The Blind Man of Seville (50 page)

17th October 1951, Tangier

R. tells me that G. is pregnant again. He is both happy and terrified after the last occasion. I am amazed how this monument to ruthlessness can be reduced to the softness of dough. He quivers at the memory of her suffering. When I tell P. about the pregnancy she looks at me with longing and I realize why she came to my studio in July.

8th February 1952, Tangier

R. has sold all our boats to various competitors and they have paid the top market price. He has also emptied the warehouses and rents them out to the same people who bought the boats. I am astonished, but he assures me that the smuggling business has peaked, that negotiations are underway between the US and Spain. The Americans want to build bases to counter the perceived Soviet threat. Franco will let them in because he wants to stay in power. There will be a trade link.

20th April 1952, Tangier

G. went into labour and it was much worse than before. The complications were such that the doctors even asked R. who they should save, wife or child. He chose G. because he could not live without her. Having decided this G. rallied and the baby was delivered, apparently unscathed. This brush with near tragedy brings P. and I closer and we go back to the old days and rediscover some of our passion. She comes to the studio in the afternoons and I work and lie down with her. The paintings are better than before, but they still haven’t recaptured that lost moment.

18th November 1952, Tangier

At a reception in the Hotel El Minzah I meet Mercedes, the Spanish wife of an American banker. Her husband had bought my work at C.B.’s gallery in NY and so she knows me like an old friend. After her years in America, she comes across as very modern, not the typical Spanish woman from across the straits. I ask her to my studio and she arrives the next day in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac, which she sends away. I make tea. She braces herself against the verandah rail and looks out to sea. She has a boyish figure, narrow hips, small breasts and slim muscular legs. I show her some abstract Tangier landscapes I have been doing, which she notices have cubist elements from Braque floating in blazing bands of colour, as she’s seen in Rothko’s work in NY. I am taken with her intelligence. We are drawn to each other and it isn’t long before I find out what that taut little body, or rather, mind, is capable of. There is a wickedness in the workings of it. As she reaches her moment she goes into frenzy where nothing else matters (certainly not me, on whom she is pounding her pelvis) and she howls like a she-wolf. We come crashing to the floor, where she lies, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed, lips white and a vein in her neck, thick as cord, thundering with dark carnal blood. It’s invigorating to find such sophistication shot through with base animal desires. There’s danger here, too. M. seems capable of taking me across boundaries to zones where there are no limits. It is an irony not lost on me that here we are in Tangier, captives of the International Zone of Morocco, in the cockpit of Africa, where a new kind of society is being created. A society in which there are no codes. The ruling committee of naturally suspicious European countries has created a permissible chaos in which a new grade of humanity is emerging. One that does not adhere to the usual laws of community but seeks only to satisfy the demands of self. The untaxed, unruled business affairs of the International Zone are played out in its society’s shunning of any form of morality. We are a microcosm of the future of the modern world, a culture in a Petri dish in the laboratory of human growth. Nobody will say, ‘Oh, Tangier, those were the days,’ because we will all be in our own Tangier. That is what we have been fighting like dogs for, all over the world, for the last four decades.

15th March 1953, Tangier

R., having sold all our smuggling boats, has bought a yacht. A plaything for him to bob around on and look successful. I could probably afford one myself with the money from the partnership and the sales I am making through M.’s contacts in NY, but it would give me no satisfaction. I am nearly forty years old and ostensibly successful, but I am conscious of my problem. My mind drifts from it at the first opportunity. None of my fortune is as a result of my own doing. R. has structured my entire life in no less a way than the Legion did. P. was my muse, without her the charcoal drawings would never have been done. M. has built me a reputation amongst the Americans so that I sell well in NY. But I am a shell. Knock into me and my emptiness booms.

2nd April 1953, Tangier

The success of Paul Bowles has attracted a crowd of American writers and artists to our little Utopia. I met a man called William Burroughs who, it seems to me, has done nothing of any note except to carry a massive reputation before him. He shot his wife in Mexico in a William Tell stunt, in which he missed the glass she’d placed on her head and the bullet drilled a hole in her brain. The American who tells me this story does so in a state of appalled amusement, as if this is something from a film he’s just seen. I look across the grubby floor of the Bar La Mar Chica to where W.B. sits and am prepared to be fascinated by the wife killer. Instead I see a bank clerk, just like the ones employed in town, except this one has the skull of the figure in Edvard Munch’s
Scream.
When we meet I tell him this and he says: ‘How that bastard knew what was coming, we’ll never know. Shit. And I tell you, that’s how I see the sky sometimes … just like that. You know … like blood. Like fucking blood.’ His magnetism lies in his instant access to savagery. He unleashes this on those around him he does not like, but I think he reserves the real ferocity for himself. He is like a howling animal and I think of that mad boy R. saw years ago in the village in the sierra, collared and chained up outside. It brings me closer to understanding why I put pen to paper.

28th June 1953, Tangier

I have three lives. With P. and the children I am decorous. The parameters are set for little minds. I am mild and approximately cheerful while my chest gapes with shuddering yawns. I look at P., the perfect mother, and wonder how she was ever my muse. I have my life in the studio. The work proceeds. The Tangier landscapes have developed into something different. Vast red skies bleed into a massive black continent and in between is smeared a momentary civilization. The work is broken up by a stream of boys who drop by to earn a few pesetas. My third life is with M., my society companion and deviant.

23rd October 1953, Tangier

C.B. invites me and P. to an evening with B.H. I am not happy about this one life bleeding into the other. We go to the Palace Sidi Hosni and as usual wait for our hostess amidst her fabulous wealth. P. is bored and C.B. takes her off and, being the man he is, manages to charm her even with his splintered Spanish. B.H. arrives as I am about to propose leaving. She works her way round to us and, on meeting P., is seized by an idea. She leads us off to the room guarded by the towering Nubian and it’s only as we enter that I realize that I have never told P. of the sale of the drawing. B.H. takes her straight to the piece in its pride of place next to Picasso. P. blinks at it as if she’s seen one of her children hurt. I know from the green look that finds its way to me that she considers this a betrayal of trust. B.H., who has had some drink, is unaware of this pain and it is C.B. who moves us on. On the way home P. is silent as she shimmers through the Kasbah, her heels clopping on the cobbles. I shamble behind, lying to her back like a beggar who’s been refused some change.

19th February 1954, Tangier

R. has gone to Rabat and Fez to talk to the French and Moroccan administrators. He asked me to join him, but I am working on some huge abstracts which I hope will break me out of what M. tells me is the ‘B List’ of respected artists. She wants my name to join those across the Atlantic like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. She thinks my landscape work is as strong as Rothko’s. I look at Rothko and see him coming at his subject from a different angle. He aims high, seeking a spiritual element, I am pointed towards darkness and decadence.

3rd March 1954, Tangier

R. is back from his travels, much heartened by the bureaucrats. He alarms me by telling me that he has embarked on a piece of business with the Moroccans. I tell him that he does not understand the secretive nature of the Moroccan mind — they have ways of ensnaring even the sharpest operator. He dismisses the possibility and tells me not to worry. I will not be involved.

18th June 1954, Tangier

I drop by my home in the Medina one afternoon and am surprised to find P. is not there. The children are playing on the patio. Paco is being a torero, his little sister is the bull. He performs great flourishes with his shirt and she aimlessly toddles through and is enchanted to find herself on the other side. How this game developed I don’t know, because Paco has never seen a bullfight. I am detached from their lives. But where is P.? Nobody knows. I play with the children, giving Paco a slightly more dangerous
toro.
I am surprised how deft he is with the shirt and understand some of Manuela’s glee. I bore quickly though, and return to my studio.

20th December 1954, Tangier

We have been lucky to escape the worst of the débacle. Property prices have crashed. Everybody’s hope that Tangier would become the Monaco of Africa has faded. It moves R. to take out all his capital and we fly to Switzerland, where he opens up an account in my name and deposits the fantastic sum of $85,000, which is the major part of my profit from our ten-year partnership. I have no way of disputing this and we have a celebratory dinner. This is the end of an era. R. is going his own way in business. At the end of the meal we embrace.

17th May 1955, Tangier

P. has been seeking me out in my studio for the first time in ages. She has been here three days running and we have made love every afternoon. M. is away in Paris with her husband and only the odd boy comes knocking and has to be sent away with a bribe. I am puzzled by her sudden ardour until I realize that I have been at home more in M.’s absence and have rehabilitated myself with my family.

When she leaves I lie under the gathered knot of the mosquito net and the dangling gauze makes me think of birth, waters breaking, and I wonder whether I have been coaxed into fathering another child.

11th July 1955, Tangier

How things converge. Today I am forty years old. P. tells me I am going to be a father again. R. has deposited another $25,000 in my account and the partnership has been officially dissolved. M.’s husband has asked for a divorce and is prepared to hand over a substantial sum to get it (a twenty-two-year old Texan girl is the reason). I have moved away from the abstract and back to the figurative. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by de Kooning, who has moved away from the crowded and chaotic patterning of his
Excavation
and steered himself more towards
Women.
Or not. Maybe I’m just chasing C.B.’s dream and my own. I have worked until the light has faded. I am about to go for dinner with my family. I feel nothing but total desperation.

1st November 1955, Tangier

Last month Sultan Mohammed V was recalled from his exile in Madagascar where the French sent him three years ago. He is due back some time this month. It is the beginning of the end, although you wouldn’t know it to see the expatriates here. They fiddle while Rome burns, but what do they care? I am burning for M., who has been away for months sorting out her divorce. We will all be consumed by fire.

12th January 1956, Tangier

Another son, whom I have decided to call Javier, which is a name I have always liked and has nothing to do with family. For the first time I look down on one of my children and feel, not so much a surge of paternal love, but a wild feeling of hope. This child, with his fists clenched and eyes screwed up, for some reason makes me think that great things are possible. He is the one bright light in my forty-first year.

28th June 1956, Tangier

I lie on my back under the net with Javier on my chest. His legs are braced like a little frog’s, the toes are dug into my belly. My hand covers his entire back. He sleeps and occasionally, unconsciously, kneads my chest on the off chance that there will be some milk. How quickly disappointment enters our lives.

He lies on a blanket as I work. I talk him through the paintings, the ideas, the influences. He slowly brings his hands and feet together as if mocking me with silent, dawdling applause. I look down on him and small cracks open up in me. His soft, tiny body, his large brown eyes, his downy head, all come together and, as with a chisel slipped between my ribs, I am levered open.

27

Sunday, 22nd April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

Encarnación’s niece, Juanita, was the first to arrive at 11 a.m. Falcón was still groggy from a heavily drugged sleep. The extra sleeping pill he’d taken at 4 a.m. had as good as interred him in concrete.

He showered, and put on a pair of grey trousers that were so loose at the waist he had to find a belt. The jacket, too, did not hold him at the shoulders. The weight was falling off him. His cheeks looked hollow in the mirror, his eyes sunken and dark. He was turning into his own idea of a madman.

In the kitchen, Juanita moved around on black stacked trainers, which squeaked on the floor. As she tossed her head, a river of black hair jumped off her back. Falcón checked the fridge was well stocked with fino and manzanilla and went down to the cellar to bring up the red wine to drink with the roast lamb.

The cellar was at the back of the house under the studio. He had used this enclosed space as his dark room but had not been in there since Inés had left the house. His developing paraphernalia was still there in the corner. A line of string hung across the room with clothes pegs still attached for drying prints. He missed the excitement of
revelation, of the blank sheet slipping into the developer and, slowly emerging from the waters, a face coming to him. Was that what he had in his head? All these images that just needed some developer for the latent memories to find form, come through his consciousness and solve his crux.