The Blind Man of Seville (45 page)

‘You know,’ he says, ‘this is all very interesting stuff. I like it. I mean that. I like it. The interlocking shapes in the Moorish tradition. The patterned chaos. The bleak landscapes. It all does something for me. But we ‘re not talking about me. I buy for clients. And this is what my clients want. They don’t want the cool intellectual stuff … not the people who come to Tangier. They come for … what shall I call it? … eastern promise.’

‘On the northwest tip of Africa?’ I say.

‘It’s kind of a saying,’ he says. ‘It means they want something exotic, sensual, mysterious … Yeah, mystery is the thing. Why
isn’t
this for sale?’

‘Because it’s important to me. It’s a new and recent development.’

‘I can see that. Your other drawings are perfect … meticulously observed. But this … this is different. This is so revealing … and yet, forbidden. Maybe that’s it. The nature of mystery is that it shows something of itself, it entices but it forbids the ultimate knowledge.’

Has Charles Brown been smoking, I ask myself. But he is sincere. He pushes again for a price. I don’t give in. He tells me his client has to see the work. I won’t let it out of the house. He finishes our discussion with the words:

‘Don’t worry I’ll bring the mountain to Mohammed.’

He leaves, shaking my damp hand. I tremble with excitement. I am in a sweat and tear off my clothes and lie on the floor naked. I smoke a hashish cigarette, one of the half dozen I prepare for myself every morning. I look at the drawing of P. I am as priapic as Pan and, as if by telepathy, a boy arrives from C. and releases my steam.

4th November 1946, Tangier

I lie in my room in a state of controlled nonchalance for two days. My ear is trained and finely tuned to the faintest knock on the front door. I fall asleep and when the knock comes I burst to the surface like a man freed from a sinking ship. I wrestle with the bolster and try to dress at the same time. I do a comic turn while the houseboy waits at the side of the bed with an envelope. It is he who has prodded me awake. I tear open the envelope. Inside is a gold-embossed card from Mrs Barbara Woolworth Hutton, and in her own handwriting she asks if she may visit Francisco González in his home on 5th November 1946 at 2.45 p.m. I show the card to R., who is impressed, I can tell. ‘We have a problem here,’ he says. R. likes problems, which is why he is always creating them. The problem is my name.

‘Name me a González who has done anything of note in the world of art,’ says R.

‘Julio González, the sculptor,’ I say.

‘Never heard of him,’ says R.

‘He worked with iron — abstract geometric shapes — he died four years ago.’

‘You know what Francisco González says to me? It says button seller.’

‘Why buttons?’ I ask, and he ignores me.

‘What’s your mother’s name?’

‘I can’t use my mother’s name,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t use it, that’s all.’

‘What is it?’

‘Falcón,’ I say.

‘No, no, no, que no … es perfecto.
Francisco Falcón. From now on that is your name.’

I try to tell him that it will not do, but I don’t want to reveal more than I have to, so I accept my fate. I am Francisco Falcón and I have to admit it has something … Apart from being alliterative there is a rhythm to it, as there is to Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Antonio Gaudí, even the simpler Joan Miró … they all have the rhythm of fame. They’ve known this for some time in Hollywood, which is why we have Greta Garbo and not Greta Gustafson and Judy Garland not Frances Gumm, never Frances Gumm.

5th November 1946, Tangier

She came as promised and I am completely delirious. I have not smoked this evening so that the diamond brightness of the moment is not lost in the hashish haze. She arrived, escorted by Charles Brown, who is monumental next to her and utterly deferential. I am struck by her extraordinary grace and elegance, the perfection of her dress, the softness of her gloves, which must have come from the underbelly of a five-week-old kid. What I like more is her natural disapproving look. Her wealth, which is an encasing aura, sealing her off from normal mortals, has made her demanding, but I think when she falls … she falls hard. Her heels click expensively on my terracotta floor. She says: ‘Eugenia Errázuriz would love these tiles.’ Whoever she may be.

I am mesmerized, but surprise myself by not being tongue-tied as we go to the exhibition room. I have refined R.’s technique and this time the drawing is not even on display. She walks around the room placing each foot carefully in front of the other. Charles Brown is murmuring words in her ear, which I imagine is lined with mother-of-pearl. She listens and nods. She is taken with the Moorish shapes. She moves swiftly past the bleak, Russian landscapes. She hovers over the Tangier drawings. She turns on her heel. The kid gloves are off and hang limply from one of her small white hands. ‘This is excellent work,’ she says. ‘Remarkable. Original. Quite strange. Very affecting. But Charles tells me you have something that is even beyond the excellence of these pieces, which you’ve had the good grace to allow me to view.’

I know what you refer to and I told Mr Brown that it was not for sale. I thought it unfair to even show it to you.’

‘I would only like to see it,’ she says. ‘I would never want to take something from you that was so important.’

‘Then it is understood,’ I say. ‘Follow me.’

I have arranged the drawing so that it is perfectly lit at the end of a long dark corridor and displayed against an old terracotta brick wall beneath a white arch, which has been textured by decades of whitewash. This part of the house is quite dark and I know that she will suddenly come across it and will be drawn to it like a moth. I am not wrong. And, I don’t think I am mistaken, when she first sees the drawing she lets out a little sexual moan. She walks towards it and I see that in her eyes she is lost. My work is done. I stand back and let her go on alone. She doesn’t move for ten minutes. Then she bows her head and turns away. At the front door her eyes are glistening. ‘Thank you so much,’ she says. ‘I hope you will do me the honour of being my guest at dinner one of these evenings.’ She holds out her hand. I bow and kiss it.

6th November 1946, Tangier

The day starts with a dinner invitation from B.H. An hour later Charles Brown arrives. I arrange mint tea and smoke a cigarette. The conversation is long and meandering and includes enquiries relating to my past, which I lie about in monstrous fashion thinking, on the spur of the moment, that this is best, that in this way nobody will ever know me, including possibly myself, and so I will sustain the mysterious aura which will become the trademark of my work. I lose myself in this thought: that even after I’m gone and the laborious, scholarly effort is made to get to the bottom of Francisco Falcón (there, you see, the transformation is already complete, I wrote that without thinking — Francisco González has disappeared), the onion layers will be parted one after the other, leading to the kernel of truth. But, as everybody knows, the truth about an onion is nothing. When the last parchment of onion matter is teased open there is nothing. No little message. It is nothing. I am nothing. We are nothing. The realization of this gives me enormous strength. I feel a huge surge of immoral freedom. For me there are no rules. I come back to C.B. with a start. He is asking me whether I will consider selling. I say no. He asks me whether I would bring it with me to dinner to show the other guests. This would be psychologically weakening, so again I say no. C.B. and I head for the door and he says: ‘You realize that Mrs Hutton would be prepared to part with a significant amount of money for your piece.’

‘There is no doubt in anybody’s mind of the means of the owner of the Palace Sidi Hosni,’ I say.

He leaves his parting shot until the last moment.

‘Five hundred dollars,’ he says, and walks off down the narrow street, turns left and heads back up to the Kasbah.

I use all my powers of restraint not to call him back.

11th November 1946, Tangier

I should have written this last night when the perfection of the whole evening was still fresh in my mind. I arrived back so drunk and in such a state of excitement that I had to smoke several pipes of hashish to bring me down into a fitful slumber. I have woken up thick-headed, with a flighty memory rather than one tethered to the facts.

I arrive at the gates of the Sidi Hosni Palace and am admitted, on showing my invitation, by a liveried Tanjawi in white pantaloons. I am instantly in a dream world, where I am handed from servant to servant and walked through rooms and patios, on which no expense has been spared by the previous owner, whose name escapes me. Blake? Or was it Maxwell? Or perhaps both.

The palace has been made up of a number of houses which have all been linked to a central structure where I am led. The effect is bewildering, magical and mysterious. It is a microcosm of the Moroccan mind. The servant leaves me in a room in which some of the guests are behaving as if they’re at a cocktail party, and others as if they’re in a museum. Both are right. I am in a suit but am swarthier from my outdoor life, which sets me apart from the predominantly white people in the room. One woman nearly asks me for a drink but realizes at the last moment that I am not wearing gloves or a fez. Instead she asks me what wood the floor is made of. C.B. rescues me and introduces me around the room. At each introduction a flutter bursts up to the chandeliers (which are to be replaced with Venetian glass) like a flock of doves. I realize this dinner has been set up for me, to present me to society, to flatter me. A drink is put in my hand. It is ferocious with alcohol. The colossal C.B. has his hand on my shoulder as if I’m his younger statue and with a bit more bronze poured into me I could command as large a square as he. No hostess yet. I am ill-equipped for the occasion, not through lack of language but lack of social niceties. The talk is of New York, London and Paris, about horses, fashion, yachts, property and money. I am told things about our hostess, about how she gave her London home to the American government as a gift, how the carpet on the wall is from Qom, the marquetry from Fez, the bronze head from Benin. They know everything about B.H.’s world but none of them had penetrated the carapace of her significant wealth. But I had. And that was why I was there. C.B. III had told everybody, in so many words, that I had got inside and done it with the simplest and yet most beguiling charcoal drawing that said more in its moment than the endlessly restructured, laboriously crafted, massively overstuffed palace of Sidi Hosni. As I moved around the room I picked up invitations to other social occasions as well as a number of sexual offers from women. The same depravity that trickles thickly and darkly down the alleys of the Soco Chico is here behind the gilded walls of the palatial home of the old Muslim Holy Man, Sidi Hosni.

B.H. comes straight to me, holds out her hand. I kiss it. We are the centre of attention. She says, ‘I must show you something.’ We leave the room. She heads for a door guarded by a tall, very black Nubian, who is in white pantaloons but stripped to the waist. She unlocks the door, which is heaved open by the Nubian, and we enter her private gallery. There is a Fragonard, a Braque, even an El Greco. A painting by that terrible fraud Salvador Dalí, a Manet, a Kandinsky. I am stunned. There are drawings, too. I see a Picasso and others which I am told are by Hassan el Glaoui, the son of the Pasha of Marrakesh. Then comes the psychological point of the whole evening. B.H. leads me to a space on the wall. ‘Here,’ she says, ‘I want to put something that sums up my feelings about Morocco. The piece will have to be elusive, apparent and yet untouchable, revealing and yet incomprehensible, available but forbidden. It must tantalize like the truth, just as you think you can put your finger on it, it slips away.’ These were not entirely her words, some belonged to C.B. and I think others have been sewn in by me. She finishes with the words: ‘I want your drawing to be part of this collection.’ This was a planned assault. I knew I had to give in. To withhold any more risked boring my assailants. I nod. I acquiesce. She grips my arm at the bicep. We look enthralled at the space on the wall. ‘Charles will talk to you about the details. I want you to know that you have made me very happy.’

The rest of the evening passed in a crystal blur, as seen at speed through a torrent of Venetian glassware. This had much to do with the savagery of the alcohol in the drinks. As I left for the night, B.H. had long since departed, C.B. took me to one side and told me that I had made Mrs Hutton very generous. ‘She rewards genius. I have been instructed not to negotiate but to simply give you this.’ It was a cheque for $1,000. He promised to drop by in the morning and pick up the piece. I am now worth one-tenth of a Van Cleef & Arpels gold mantel clock.

23rd December 1946, Tangier

Still no word from Pilar, I am desperate. I try to advance the work. I try to put into paint what I saw that afternoon, but it does not translate. Where it was so simple it has become complicated. I need P. to come back and remind me of what I saw that day. I have given up on society. I am bored by its gentility. I was much in demand after my triumph with B.H. but now the hungry beast has moved on. I am relieved but still swamped.

7th March 1947, Tangier

I have stopped work. I sit in front of the seven remaining drawings of P. with not an idea in my head. I have even worked under the influence of majoun. After one session I came back to reality feeling I had done something great only to find I had painted seven black canvases. I hang them in a whitewashed room and stand amongst them in a state of total desolation.