The Blind Man of Seville (55 page)

The ferry journey lasted an hour and a half. He spent most of it watching a Moroccan version of himself taking down the details of a group of six boys — illegal immigrants, who were being returned. They were cheerful. Tourists gave them the thumbs up and cigarettes. The policeman was firm but not unkind.

Tangier appeared out of the mist without dredging up a single memory. The long rainy winter had left the surrounding country a deep, lush green, which was not a colour he associated with Morocco. There was something familiar about the cascade of grubby whitewashed houses within the walls of the old town, which fell from the Kasbah at the top of the cliff to the Grand Mosque at the lower end. Beyond the walls the
ville nouvelle
had pushed further around the bay. He tried to find the old house where his father’s studio had been but it was either hidden amongst the apartment blocks or had been destroyed to make way for them.

The taxi driver took him from the port to the Hotel Rembrandt and tried to charge him 150 dirham, which involved an ugly argument and a dishonourable discharge with half that amount changing hands. The reception, still in its fifties marble splendour, gave him the key to room 422 and he took his own bag up there.

The hotel had suffered in the intervening half-century. There was a glass panel missing from one of the doors in his room. Paint peeled off the metal windows. The furniture looked as if it had taken refuge from a violent husband. But there was a perfect view of the bay of Tangier and Falcón sat on the bed and gaped at it, while thoughts of deracination spread through his mind.

He went out to get some food, knowing they ate early in Morocco, but found the time two hours behind Spain and at 6 p.m. nowhere was open. He walked to the Place de France and then down past the Hotel El Minzah to the Grand Soco and entered the Medina through the market, which brought him out in a street not far from the Spanish cathedral. From there he tried to remember the route to his old family home. He must have walked it a thousand times with his mother. It didn’t come back to him and he was soon lost in the maze of narrow alleys until quite by accident he found himself in front of a house he recognized.

The door was opened by a maid who spoke only Arabic. She disappeared. A man in his fifties wearing a white burnous and white leather babouches came to the door. Falcón explained himself and the man was stunned. It had been his own father who had bought the property from Francisco Falcón. Javier was welcomed in. The man, Mohammed Rachid, showed him around the house, which was structurally exactly the same, with the fig tree still in its place and the strange high room with the window at the top.

Rachid invited Falcón to dinner. Over a vast shared bowl of couscous Javier revealed that his mother had died in the house and asked if any of the neighbours would have been alive at the time. One of the boys was sent out with instructions. He was back in minutes with an invitation to take a coffee next door.

The neighbouring family included an old man of seventy-five, who would have been thirty-four at the time of his mother’s death. He remembered the incident very well because most of what happened took place outside his front door.

‘The unusual thing was that
two
doctors turned up,’ said the old man, ‘and there was a disagreement as to who was to see the patient. As it happened, the woman, your mother, was already dead and so your father had called his own doctor to deal with the matter.

‘Your father had arrived back from his studio for breakfast to find his wife dead in her bed. In his distress he called the only doctor he knew, which was his own. A German. Your mother’s doctor, a Spaniard, seemed quite satisfied with this and was about to leave when the Riffian woman, your mother’s maid, burst out of the house and announced that her mistress had been poisoned. She held a glass of something in her hand, that she said had come from her mistress’s bedside. Nobody believed her and she took the drastic step of drinking some of the liquid. Your father tore the glass from her grip and with great drama she fell to the ground. There was consternation. The Spanish doctor leapt forward. But it was a sham. She wasn’t dead. There was no poison. And the maid was dismissed as a hysteric.’

Falcón couldn’t control the trembling in his hands, not even by clasping them together. Sweat trickled down his cheek and nausea swooned in his head at this light-hearted recounting of the drama. He staggered to his feet
from the cushions on the floor, knocking over the undrunk cup of coffee. Mohammed Rachid stood to help him.

They walked to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco, and a battered Mercedes took him back to the Hotel Rembrandt. Once out of the house and the Medina he calmed down, brought the panic under control. It was just that the old man’s benign recounting of the story had brought it all back to him. The horror of that morning. His mother dead in her bed and this unseemly commotion in the street outside. He remembered it and yet there were still gaps and he hadn’t wanted the old man to continue because … He didn’t know why. He just wanted to get out of there as soon as possible.

Back at the hotel he sank on to the bed in the darkness of the room and looked out to sea over the lights of the town and harbour. He was desolate. His body shuddered under a spasm of loneliness and all his deferred grief at Pepe’s death came to the surface. He fell back, drew his knees up into a foetal position and tried to hold himself together, afraid that if he didn’t do this he would fragment beyond repair. Some hours later he released himself and stripped off his clothes. He took a sleeping pill, scratched the bedclothes over himself and passed out.

The morning was nearly over by the time he woke up. There was no hot water. He showered under cold, which brought his mind back sharply to the inexplicable fact that he was quietly weeping a stream of tears that he was powerless to stop. His hands hung limp at his sides and he shook his head in misery. His body, now, was out of his control.

He walked up to the Place de France and took a coffee at the Café de Paris. From there he went to the Spanish consulate and, showing his police ID, asked if there was anybody Spanish still living in Tangier who had been
there in the late fifties and sixties. They told him to go to a restaurant called Romero’s and ask for Mercedes of the same name.

The restaurant was in a garden wedged between two roads leading to a roundabout. The door was opened by an elderly man in a white jacket and a fez, whose breathing difficulties were manifest. As they made their way to the table a Pekingese dog attacked them. Javier winced at its penetrating yap.

He ordered steak and asked after Mercedes Romero and the old man pointed to an elderly, well-coiffed, blonde woman who was playing patience at a single table on the other side of the empty restaurant. He asked the old man to give her a note of introduction, which he wrote out on a page of his notebook. The old man staggered away, placed the note before Mercedes, told her the order and was given some money to buy the steak.

Mercedes came slowly across the room. She grabbed the Pekingese by the scruff, rubbed its tummy and threw it under an empty table. She sat opposite him and asked him if he was the son of Francisco Falcón, which Javier confirmed.

‘I never knew him,’ she said. ‘Nor Pilar, but I was a good friend of your stepmother, Mercedes, who was about my age. She used to eat in the restaurant my family owned then in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France. We were very close and I was devastated by her death.’

‘I never called her my stepmother,’ said Falcón. ‘I always referred to her as my second mother. We were very close, too.’

‘Yes, she told me that she thought of you as her own son and how desperate she was for you to follow in your father’s footsteps. She hoped that you might be an even greater artist than he.’

‘I was barely eight years old at the time.’

‘You don’t remember that then,’ she said, nodding behind him.

In a simple black frame on the wall above his head was a line drawing of a woman. Underneath was written
Mercedes.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘You drew that in the summer of 1963. Mercedes gave it to me as a Christmas present. It’s of her, of course, not me. I asked her why she was giving it to me and she said something very strange: “Because with you I know it will be safe.”’

Tears brimmed in Falcón’s eyes. He’d given up any attempt at control of his emotions.

‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I still remember the night she left and didn’t come back. They never recovered the body and I think not seeing her again made it harder. I saw my mother in her casket …’

‘Where is your father now?’ asked Mercedes.

‘He died two years ago.’

‘Maybe you remember someone else from that time — your father’s agent, Ramón Salgado?’

Falcón nodded madly and told her how Salgado had just been murdered and that he was the investigating officer. It all came out why he was in Tangier, which was when the old man in the fez came staggering back with the steak and salad, which he breathed over heavily as he served.

‘Perhaps if you’d been a detective back then you might have dealt with the matter of Mercedes’ death with a more penetrating eye than the local police.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t believe in gossip — I hear too much of it running a restaurant — but there was a lot of it about at that time. Enough gossip to have made anyone seriously investigating that tragedy ask harder questions than they did.’

‘What are you implying, Sra Romero?’ said Falcón quietly.

‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Mercedes was my friend and I was very sorry to lose her, especially in a boating accident. She had spent a lot of time on boats. Her husband, Milton, owned one. She had sailed across the Atlantic several times. She was a very experienced and sure-footed sailor. She did not make mistakes. They said it was rough that night, that a storm had got up in the straits, but I can tell you it was nothing compared to some of the storms she’d been through coming over the Atlantic. They said she fell overboard and I’m afraid that I for one did not believe it. I did not believe the gossip that ran along the lines of how careless it was of your father to have lost two wives. That disgusted me. But both your father and Ramón Salgado should have been forced to account for their actions in an official inquiry, at least.’

Falcón got up from the table, his steak untouched, and walked out of the restaurant. He wasn’t prepared to listen to that sort of stuff. That was what happened when you became famous. People loved to speculate at your expense. Fine. But he was not going to be a party to that. He walked flat out back to the Hotel Rembrandt, sprinted up to room 422 and threw himself on the bed, wrapped a pillow over his ears and clamped his eyes shut.

It was night-time when he woke up and a great storm was playing itself out across the straits over Spain. The sheet lightning ran for hundreds of kilometres, illuminating the vast, stacked clouds boiling in the night sky. Outside it was spitting. He found a restaurant and ate a lamb tagine and drank a bottle of Cabernet Président. He staggered back to the hotel, collapsed on the bed and woke up sweating and fully clothed. He stripped and crawled back into bed. The rain slashed and raked at the windows.

*    *    *

The Friday morning was drear and sodden. He had one more enquiry to make, which was probably going to be more fruitless than the rest. He checked out of the hotel and took a
grand taxi
to Tetuán, which broke down on the way so that he arrived in the late afternoon. He made a quick tour of the town’s Spanish community, trying to find somebody who might have known the González family who ran a hotel business back in the thirties.

By seven o’clock he’d lost his guide in the Medina and was wandering aimlessly through the alleyways, following carts piled high with fresh mint, when he came across a sight in a narrow street that totally paralysed him with panic.

A man with a cart of steel churns was pouring milk into local women’s calabashes, in which they would make their yoghurt. The gush of white liquid induced nausea. The flat white calm of the full calabashes turned him and sent him on a wild run through the streets and out of the Medina.

He gave up on trying to find someone to explain ‘the incident’ from his father’s journals. He found a cheap hotel with a bar. He drank beer and ate
albóndigas
in a crowd of Moroccan men, under a pall of cigarette smoke. He engaged in their small talk so as not to slip back into more despairing thoughts.

That night he was woken by a dream, a terrible dream, which he had to walk out of himself in his small room. The dream had been of nothing, of a terrible whiteness — an amorphous, consuming blankness that contained no memories, no past, no present and no future. It was the end of time and it seemed to want him.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

12th January 1958, Tangier

I come back home early to take Javier out for a little treat on his second birthday but P. and he are not at home. The other children are at school. There is only the one maid at home, a Riffian woman, who speaks some impenetrable Berber dialect that only P. understands. I am fuming and go back to the studio and paint a canvas with terrible slashing strokes of red, as if I’m carving my way through the ranks of the enemy. The result is a work of terrifying energy, of appalling violence such as I’ve only ever committed on the battlefield. I burn it and watching the sickle slashes of paint being consumed by fire gives me near-sexual pleasure.

15th July 1958, Tangier

R. has turned up at the studio (he’s never been before). G. is pregnant again and he’s in a terrible state. He waits for my admonishment. I say nothing and he calls me a true friend. The doctor had been savage with him. He tells me over and over that it was an accident so that I stop believing him. ‘This time I will lose her,’ he says, and I see his passion for her, a passion I used to have for P. and now have for Javier. I’m moved and try to calm him. She will have to stay still for the entire pregnancy, he says, and for the first time I think there’s something else at play here. He seems scared by the fact that she can’t be moved and when I press him on this he suddenly says: ‘We should all leave and go back to Spain.’ I think he has a problem in his business, but he won’t be drawn on the matter.