The Blind Man of Seville (63 page)

13th January 1961, Tangier

I go back to the house in the afternoon. As soon as I open the front door I smell burning, or rather old smoke, a cold fire. There is a black patch on the patio and the wind has stirred up the black flakes of burnt paper, which swirl and drift like a plague of insects with no escape. I move amongst this world of moths, black flecks attach to my cool but sweaty face. I cannot think why a fire should have been started here until I see a scrap of paper, its edges scorched to a black frill. I turn it over and see the vestiges of a charcoal line. I go to the room which had been my studio. I stand in front of the chest whose bottom drawer is open. The seven remaining drawings of P. have gone.

I go wild and tear through the house to her bedroom, which is locked. I throw my shoulder into the door and it blasts open. It is empty. I take the bone sculpture and go straight back to my studio on the bay. I take up hammers and go to the roof. I smash it to pieces with a hammer in each hand. I collect up the shards and with mad, obsessive strength I grind them up in the pestle and mortar. I bag the bone dust and go to a cheap tourist shop and buy a simple clay urn. I pour the bone dust into it. I take it home and place it on the dressing table.

18th January 1961, Tangier

Nothing has been said. The black patch on the patio has gone. I don’t know where the urn is. It remained on her dressing table for a few days and then disappeared. We move around each other as if we ‘re at the heart of a collapsing empire, as if we are emperor and empress with designs on each other’s power in the midst of this final demise. We know what it will take. Suspicion lurks in the corridors. We are drawn to each other’s company, which is mutually abhorrent but we have to look on what the other is doing. She will only take drink and food prepared for her by her Riffian maid. I profess disinterest and take my meals in the restaurant at the Grand Hotel Villa de France. I watch her routine and wait. There was a story from Ancient Rome of a man and wife in exactly our situation. The wife noticed the husband eating figs from the tree. She painted them with poison and watched him die. We are not in the season for figs.

25th January 1961, Tangier

I sit in the studio. It has taken me all day to find this screw of paper that I have in front of me. I smoke and smooth out the paper. I finger the two glass capsules of cyanide given to me by the legionnaire I’d saved from gaol. I sniff them. Nothing. From the recess of my brain I remember that cyanide smells like almonds.

2nd February 1961, Tangier

P. has been going to bed earlier and the Riffian woman now calls one of the children to take her warm almond milk to her. Paco and Manuela always send Javier, who is delighted to perform the task. I watch from the patio. P. puts the milk on her bedside table and kisses Javier and hugs him before sending him off to bed. She drinks the milk and turns out the light.

I ask myself whether this is what I want. To be an uxoricide. Have I no morality? The question doesn’t seem relevant. The pressure is from a different quarter. The nights are longer and longer and my thoughts spend more time in the solitary dark. I lie at the centre of my studio, the mosquito net tied above my head, and an image comes to me of those first days in Russia. I see Pablito’s betrayer in my sights. Her panting breast is in the pinhole of the sights. I shift my aim, and on the command, shoot her in the mouth. Her jaw shatters. I have my answer.

5th February 1961, Tangier

I sit beneath the fig tree on the patio. I have both capsules with me. I roll them in my palm. I am not consumed by hate but moved by inevitability. We are at the crux. There is no way to change the outcome.

I hear the Riffian woman call out. Moments later Javier’s bare feet thud over the terracotta tiles. I hide in one of the rooms off the corridor to P.’s room. I hear the approach of Javier’s rustling pyjamas.

Again Sergio’s voice receded as the words tumbled down inexorably. Javier finds himself looking down at his bare feet on the terracotta tiles, the glass of almond milk chinhigh. He chews on his lip with concentration, trying not to spill a drop and is startled by his father suddenly appearing at shoulder height. His big face emerging from
the dark with such suddenness that Javier nearly drops the glass which, thank God, his father takes from him.

‘It’s only me,’ he says, and opens his eyes wide and squeezes his fingers over the glass with the word,
‘Abracadabra.’

He gives him the glass back.

‘It’s all right now,’ he says and kisses his head. ‘Go on. Take it. Don’t drop it.’

Javier clasps the glass and his father pats him on the shoulder and his feet are on the move again across the terracotta tiles, the contour of each crater and join is imprinted on his bare soles. He reaches the door, puts the glass on the floor; it takes two hands to work the handle. He picks up the glass and goes in. His mother looks up from her book. He closes the door by backing into it until he hears the latch click. He places the glass on the bedside table and clambers up on to the bed and his mother squeezes him to her bosom and he is momentarily lost in the squashiness of her nightdress. He feels her hand, the ringless hand, holding his taut tummy and her breath and the touch of her lips on his head, the way it tickles him. She is warm and the cotton smells of her and she crushes his ribs into hers and gives him a final hard kiss on the forehead, which marks him with her love forever.

Javier froze in his chair as he came back into the dark reality of the sleeping mask. The flexes still cut into him, his eyelid still burnt at the edge, the velvet of the mask was soaked from his tears and the voice behind him rolled out the final words from his father’s journal:

Moments later Javier runs past on his way back up to his bedroom. I go to the window and look through the cracks of the shutters. P. holds the glass of milk. She blows on it and drinks the first centimetre. She puts it back on the table. By the time she turns back the cyanide has reached her system. I am shocked by its speed. It’s as fast as the blood itself. She convulses, reaches for her neck and falls back. The Riffian woman goes to the children’s bedroom and their light goes off. She goes to her own room soon after. I go to P. and remove the glass. I wash it thoroughly in the kitchen and fill it to the halfway point with a bottle of almond milk I prepared earlier in the studio. I replace the glass by P.’s bed and turn out the light. I go back to the studio to write this down. I must sleep now because tomorrow I have to be up early.

Sergio finished and there was silence in the house. Javier’s tears, which had soaked into the sleeping mask, mixing with the blood from his cut eyelid, now broke down his face. He was drained. There was some movement behind him. A rag closed over his nose and mouth and a hard chemical smell as ugly as ammonia batted his brain into another soundless galaxy.

34

Monday, 30th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

It was a respite. His chloroformed brain toppled through space silently. The return to reality was fragmentary — bits of audio and then shards of visual. His head came up, the room tilted. Slices of light penetrated his eye and suddenly he was jerked awake by his own fear that something terrible might have been done to him.

He could see and his eyelids still opened and closed. Relief spread through him. He coughed. The flex was no longer around his face and his feet were free from the legs of the chair, but his wrists were still attached. He orientated himself in the room. He was facing away from the desk now. He leaned forward, trying to swallow back the turmoil rising in his chest and up his throat. He sobbed, straining against the memories, the shattered certainties. Was there any possible recovery from this?

A noise. Castors on tiles. The rush of something passing too closely. A thump of air. A man — Sergio, or was it Julio now? — shot past him and sailed to the far wall on his castored desk chair.

‘Awake?’ he asked, and nudged himself away from the wall so that he drifted nauseatingly to a point in front of Javier.

Julio Menéndez Chefchaouni sat back in the chair, relaxed. Javier’s first impression was one of beauty. His looks were almost girlish, like a star from a boy band, with long dark hair, soft brown eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones and a clear, smooth complexion. It was the sort of face a camera would love, but only for a moment.

‘Here it is, Inspector Jefe,’ he said, framing his jaw with his hands. ‘The face of pure evil.’

‘Still not finished?’ said Falcón. ‘What more can there be, Julio?’

‘I think the project needs … not an ending exactly, because I don’t believe in endings — or beginnings or middles for that matter — but it needs to make its purpose known.’

‘The project?’

‘As I think your father noted: “Nobody paints any more,”’ said Julio. ‘Daubing canvases is not so far from what cavemen used to do. You know,
Ceci n ‘est pas une pipe
and all that. Art is all about progress, isn’t it? We can’t stand still. We constantly have to show people new things, or show them that old things can be seen anew. Carl André’s
Equivalent VIII,
Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks and cows. Those plastinated real dead bodies from Gunther von Hagens’ show
Body Worlds.
And now Julio Menéndez.’

‘And what’s your project called?’

‘Even that is new. The title is constantly evolving. It is three words in English which can be placed in any order, using any preposition in between. The words are: Art. Real. Killing. So it could be the Real Art of Killing or perhaps Killing Real Art.’

‘Or the Art of Real Killing,’ said Falcón.

‘I knew you’d understand it straight away.’

‘Where is this project going to be shown?’

‘Oh, that is not really in my hands,’ said Julio. ‘It will be all over the media, of course, but, well, you’ve heard
of people who’ve devoted their lives to things such as literature. This is an extension of that. I think it will probably insist on being posthumous.’

‘Start at the beginning,’ said Falcón. ‘I’m conventional like that.’

‘As you now know, Tariq Chefchaouni was my grandfather, my mother was his only daughter, who married a Spaniard from Ceuta. His art gene missed a generation but it got me. After my first year here, at the Bellas Artes, my mother and I went to visit the family in Tangier. I asked to see some of my grandfather’s work and was told that everything had been destroyed in the fire which killed him, apart from a few effects and some books. It was a couple of years later that the family called to tell me that, in doing some building work, they’d found a small pewter box under the floor in his room.

‘I was here in Seville, studying art, and I knew a great deal about the Falcón nudes because I’d done a project on them in my second and third years. In fact, I was obsessed by them even before I came to Seville and, when I found out that your father was still living here, I even met him on a couple of occasions to iron out some technical things I didn’t understand. Of course, he only knew me as Julio Menéndez. He was very … gracious. We liked each other. He said I could call him if there was anything else I needed to know. So when I went back to Tangier and opened this pewter box I was completely fascinated to find that my grandfather seemed to have had the same obsession, except … how could he? He was already dead by the time the Falcón nudes came into existence.’

Julio opened the box and took out four postcard-sized pieces of canvas. He held each one up to Falcón. They were perfect reproductions of the Falcón nudes.

‘You can’t really see them without a magnifying glass and good light, but I can assure you they are perfect …
each brushstroke is a perfect miniature of its original.

‘Now look on the back.’

He held up the reverse side of the miniatures and each piece was inscribed to Pilar, followed by the dates May 1955, June 1956, January 1958 and August 1959.

‘There was one other thing in the box, which is no longer in my possession.’

‘The silver ring with the sapphire,’ said Falcón. ‘My mother’s ring.’

‘My first reaction when I saw the miniatures was that I would show them to your father, that he must have lost them and they had strangely come into my grandfather’s possession. But then I remembered that the Falcón nudes were all painted in the space of a year, which didn’t fit with the dates inscribed on the backs. I was confused.’

‘When was this?’

‘The end of 1998, beginning of 1999.’

‘And when did you think that there was something more sinister to this?’

‘While I was in Tangier your father had a heart attack and there was a piece in the paper accompanied by an old photograph of him in the sixties. One of the older family members said that this was the man who’d come round to the house after my grandfather died and bought up his few remaining drawings.

‘I went back to Seville and I heard at the Bellas Artes that he was still taking on students for a few weeks at a time. I called him. He remembered me and I volunteered to be his companion. He was frail after the heart attack and I had the run of his studio. The storeroom he kept locked, but I soon opened it. And there I found all the confirmation I needed, through the stunning mediocrity of his attempts to reproduce my grandfather’s work, and then again in the journals. I read them all and when I finished I stole the crucial diary and walked out. I never
went back. I never spoke to him again. I was mad with rage. I was going to publish the journal, to show the world the real Francisco Falcón … but then he died.’

‘Why didn’t you publish it anyway?’

‘I could see the whole thing being taken away from me,’ said Julio. ‘I wanted to have control.’

‘But then something must have happened.’

‘Why?’

‘For it to have become your project.’

‘Nothing happened,’ said Julio. ‘That’s the nature of the creative process. One day I decided it would be interesting to know everything about Raúl Jiménez and Ramón Salgado. The men as they are today. So, I started filming
La Familia Jiménez
and it grew from there.’