The Blind Man of Seville (60 page)

1st November 1959, Tangier

The first rains and there is nobody on the beaches. There are few people in town. The port is empty. Last month Mohammed V’s decree, giving Tangier special status, was abrogated. The Café de Paris is empty apart from the grumbling few, who blame the recent move on Casablanca’s business community, who have always been envious of Tangier’s competitive advantage. I go to the Medina and sit under the dripping balconies of the Café Central where they now only serve poor coffee or mint tea. I am aware of being watched, which is unusual as I am normally the watcher. My eyes move over the turbanned heads, the burnouses done up to the chin, the babouches clapping against hardened heels until I come across the face of the man on the beach who was talking to P. He has a pencil in his hand. Our eyes meet and I see that he knows who I am. He leaves soon after. I ask the waiter if he knows him, but he’s never been seen here before.

R. tells me he is moving again. Abdullah Diouri’s letter has got under his skin.

3rd December 1959, Tangier

M. writes, v. depressed. M.G.’s stomach pains have been diagnosed as liver cancer and no surgeon is prepared to operate. It seems he will die in months, if not weeks. She has fallen hard for M.G. and I know this news will be a savage blow. She asks after Javier, another male who has dived into her heart. Her letter makes me nostalgic for how P. and I used to be. This thought jolts me out of my seat and I pace the room. There is an intruder in my head. I root around for the lie and find the face of the man on the beach. I know I will not find peace of mind until I know who he is.

7th April 1960, Tangier

I do not work any more. I cannot. My mind has no sticking point. I cannot bear to be in the studio. I wander the town and Medina looking at faces, watching and waiting to find the stranger. He is my new obsession. I am living in my head, which has the bizarre logic of the Medina, but all I come up against is dead ends.

10th May 1960, Tangier

I had almost given up hope when, walking down the Boulevard Pasteur, I am oddly drawn to a piece in the window of one of the tourist shops, which is of carved bone. As I lift my eyes from the sculpture I see the stranger from the beach serving in the shop. At first I think it is his shop until I see an old man running the money. I go in and, ignoring the stranger, who is serving some tourists, I ask the old man about the piece in the window. He tells me it is made by his son. I am impressed and ask for his name, which he tells me is Tariq Chefchaouni. The old man says his son has a workshop on the outskirts of town, on the road to Asilah. As we talk I see next to his cash box a small basket of cheap rings. Four of them are agate cubes mounted on simple silver bands. Now I understand P.’s puzzlement, or was it fear?

When he’d read that name for the first time Falcón got to his feet and did a tour of his study with a clenched fist. By tomorrow morning he’d have the killer’s ID number and an address. He drank more whisky, poured himself another glass.

2nd June 1960, Tangier

A letter from M. telling me that M.G. IV has died, having survived two months longer than expected. She is desolate. I write her a letter of commiseration telling her to come to Morocco, leave the city, leave the scene of her grief. This is selfish. I am in need of a companion. P. and I move around each other like strangers, or rather, with a stranger in our midst. I should ask her about Tariq Chefchaouni. I should, as her husband, demand to know who she was consorting with on the beach. But I don’t. Why not? I rummage through my mind, looking for reasons and find none, other than that I seem to be frightened at the prospect. Does this seem possible of me, the veteran of Krasni Bor? But this is not physical fear. I am scared to reveal my vulnerability. I am stunned to discover that this all started last summer and I have been tormented for a full year.

3rd June 1960, Tangier

I go back to the Boulevard Pasteur and stand outside the shop, waiting for the younger man to leave. I go in and ask his father how much he wants for the bone sculpture in the window. He says it is not for sale (a technique I recognize) and we haggle. I play the game badly because I’m too concerned about T.C. returning. I pay $30, which seems like a fantastic sum, until I get the sculpture back to my studio and see that it is indeed quite a piece. There is a stunning beauty to the lines and shapes, which is offset by the macabre quality of the material used. It says something ambiguous about the quality of being human. I begin to think that the old man, rather than being crafty, has in fact done something unforgivable.

18th June 1960, Tangier

This is how I am. It is P.’s birthday. Rather than give her the usual piece of jewellery I wrap the bone sculpture. I ask her to the studio in the early evening and serve champagne on the verandah. It is still light and very warm with a gentle breeze blowing off the sea. We are hovering around a perfect moment when I give her the present. She is animated, because I normally give her a small box, rather than something which stands 40 cm high. She tears the paper off like a small girl. I watch like a wolf and see it the moment she has stripped it down to the bone. Her face, for a fraction of a second, breaks in two. Her eyes enlarge and stand off her face. She recovers. We go back to the champagne. The sky darkens. I am aware of her looking at me as if I am a strange beast that has assumed human form but been careless about leaving a hairy hoof showing. I have what I want. She has what she desires. The piece sits on her dressing table.

A letter from M. saying she has been delayed by a legal battle. It seems that the children from M.G.’s previous marriages don’t think that she deserves half his fortune.

3rd August 1960, Tangier

I find T.C.’s workshop and am told he is never there in summer. The house, I’m sure, consists of no more than two rooms with a garden behind. It is unattached to any other building so is not part of the family home. I come back at night and wait and watch. It is silent. I return the next night and slip over the wall into the lush garden, which smells of damp earth. There is a large brick tank in the middle, brimful of water. The lock at the back is very loose after the summer and the door opens easily. Inside is a straw mattress on a wooden pallet and a calabash in the corner, nothing else. I hesitate as I reach the door to the next room, as if I have some premonition that my life will be changed by crossing the threshold. The room is his studio. It is full of the same paraphernalia as my own. My torch ripples over ironwork, stone sculpture, horn carving and jewellery until it catches the edge of a painting.

I fix my beam on it and am drawn to it as if falling on my own sword. At the end of the room are three abstract nudes. Looking at them down the mote-filled flute of light is not the best way to see such works, but even in that wretched dimness their quality stands out. Two nudes reclining and one standing. I know immediately, even though they are abstracts, that the subject is P. I am eviscerated by the sight of them. They are the perfect and beautiful developments of the charcoal drawings of P. that I’d accomplished fifteen years before. Hot tears roll down my face as the thought enters my head that this should have been the rightful end of
my
work.

On the table there’s a sketch book which I cannot resist leafing through. The drawings are of the highest quality. They are figuratives of details. A hand, an ankle, a throat, large heavy breasts, buttocks, a waist and a belly. They are entrancing. Then I arrive at my own face, brilliantly dashed off. I see developments from that. Caricatures. Uglier and uglier until, in the bottom right-hand corner, I am a brute, a cartoon horror. My hand trembles with rage. His vision gives me righteousness. I am capable of anything now.

30th October 1960, Tangier

Summer is over. The tourists have abandoned us. I leave the house and wait for P. in the market. She goes through the Petit Soco to the taxi rank on the Grand Soco and gets into an old Peugeot. I follow in the next taxi, pressing more dirhams on the driver as I tell him which way to go. The Peugeot stops at T.C.’s workshop. She gets out and is welcomed in. I tell the taxi driver to wait for me. I climb over the garden wall. The bedroom door is open. I hear T.C.’s talk and P.’s laughter from the studio. The door is ajar. I see her naked as she steps out of her underwear and walks to a rumpled sheet spread out on the floor. She kneels with her back to T.C., whose robe is already showing the ludicrous signs of arousal. He works with pencil first. He has a way of putting his whole body into creating each line. The lines become balletic flourishes, as if he is dancing the work out of himself and on to the paper. He goes through three sheets and then asks P. to change her position. He moves behind her and gathers her hair up and pins it with a brush. He moves in front of her and pushes her shoulders back so that a ridge forms down her spine. P. sees his arousal and, with instinctive intimacy, pushes up his robe and strokes him until he is shuddering. She drops her head to him and he gasps. She brings up a hand to his buttocks and pulls him to her. She slowly bows her head as if in prayer. His hands tremble on her shoulders and he lets out the cry of a child woken suddenly in the night. She drinks him in. I leave.

I go back to my studio in the taxi and take up my brush for the first time in months. There are five blank canvases which I tack up on the wall. I prepare black paint. I take up a pencil. My mind is like steel. The thoughts rifle down the channels like bullets and within moments I have sketched out a drawing of utter obscenity, with P. amongst satyrs of appalling priapism. I paint with vigour and viciousness, but with clarity and precision so that when I take the paintings down they are nothing to the viewer but five black-and-white canvases. My revenge only takes shape with a precise configuration.

3rd December 1960, Tangier

I am not working. I only watch. My eye rests solely on the entanglement of two people. I have cooled to ice. My mind works with the clarity of a shout across a still, snow-covered field. I have established T.C.’s winter routine. He wakes up late, always after midday. He walks to a small café and eats breakfast and drinks tea. He smokes three or four cigarettes. In the afternoon he rarely goes back to the workshop. Sometimes he goes to his family home. He has a wife and three children, two boys and a girl, aged between five and eight. Other days he goes to the beach. He likes the bad weather. I watch him from my studio, standing in the wind and rain with his arms spread out, as if he’s welcoming the cleansing powers of the elements. At night he works. I have watched him. He is so absorbed he notices nothing. Sometimes he works naked, even in the freezing cold. Occasionally he drops, literally, to the studio floor, exhausted. He has completed a fourth nude. P. kneeling. It is phenomenal. A marvel of the mysterious simplicity of form, but with the same quality that distinguishes the previous three — the joys and dangers of the forbidden fruit.

28th December 1960, Tangier

It is a freezing night, perhaps the coldest night I’ve known in Tangier. The wind blows from the northwest bringing the chill of the Atlantic. I walk through the silent city. Not even the dogs are out. It is a long walk to T.C.’s studio and it takes me more than an hour. I do not think but climb over the wall in my usual place (I have found a spot where I land on a path rather than leave a print in the earth). I go into his bedroom and hear his feet moving over the floor and I know that he is working. I step into the light of his studio. It is warm from a wood-burning salamander in the corner. He continues to work. I move towards his back. The muscles are tense beneath his robe. I stop very close to him and still he does not notice. He lays on paint as thick as flesh. I breathe on his neck and he sets solid as stone. He does not turn. He cannot bring himself to turn.

‘It is me,’ I say.

He turns. His eyes search mine for reason and, when that is fruitless, pity. I have no need of, or desire for verbal redress and so my hand flashes out and I chop him across the throat with such brutal force that his throat cracks loudly. The brush and palette fall from his hands. He drops to his knees. I hear him desperately trying to breathe over his shattered larynx. I step behind him and hold my hand over his mouth and grip his nose. All the strength has been taken out of him by the savagery of my first blow. Only as death crowds his mind does the survival reflex shoot strength into his arms, but it is far too late. I hold him tight and snuff out the last flickering flame. I lay him face down on the floor. I take the four nudes and remove them from their stretchers and roll them up. I put them by the door. I take a five-litre can of white spirit and pour it over the floor and T.C.’s inert body. There is turpentine and alcohol, too. I drop a lighted match and leave. I walk back to my studio. I hide the canvases above my bed in the roof. I lie down. My work is done and sleep comes easily to me.

Javier drank the last of the whisky in his glass. As the enormity of what he was reading had burgeoned off the page to fill the whole room with its tumorous ghastliness, he had steadily filled and refilled his glass until he was drunk. His earlier sense of triumph had disappeared. His face felt like slapped rubber. His feet were covered in the photocopied pages that had fallen from his weakening grasp. His head nodded against his shoulder. His neck cracked back as his reflexes shunned sleep and what lay in wait for him there, but he lost all resistance; exhaustion won, his mind and body were completely played out.

His dream was of himself asleep, but not as an adult, as a child. His back was warm and he was safe under the mosquito net. He was in that half-sleep where he knew that the heat on his back was the sun and that through his half-closed eyes he could see the shallow crater he had picked from the whitewashed wall by his face. He felt the wriggling happiness of childhood come up from his stomach as he heard his mother calling his name: