The Blind Man of Seville (35 page)

‘No, he was behind the camera.’

She asked him why he was watching these movies and he explained the whole Raúl Jiménez story. She listened, fascinated, only stopping him to change the tape halfway through.

‘But why are you watching these movies?’ she asked again, at the end of it all.

‘I’ve just told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve just spent nearly half an hour …’

He stopped and thought for long, endlessly complex minutes.

‘I told you that I see photographs as memory,’ he said. ‘I’m entranced by them because I have a problem with memory. I told you that we used to go to the beach as a family, but I didn’t really remember it. I didn’t see it. It’s not something inside me that I recall. I’ve invented it to fill the gaps. I know we did go to the beach, but I can’t remember it as if it’s my own. Am I making sense?’

‘Perfect sense.’

‘I want these movies and photographs to jog my memory,’ he said. ‘When I was talking to José Manuel Jiménez about his family tragedy he told me he had problems
recalling his childhood. It made me try to remember
my
earliest memory and I panicked, because I knew it wasn’t there.’

‘Now you can answer my earlier question, about why you’re reading the journals,’ she said.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said, as if something had clicked, ‘I’m disobeying him, because I think the journals might have the secrets to my memory.’

The tape clicked off. Distant city sounds filled the room. He waited for her to change the tape but she made no move.

‘That’s all for today,’ she said.

‘But I’ve only just begun.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But we’re not going to disentangle you in a single session. This is a long process. There are no short cuts.’

‘But we’re just … we’ve just started touching on things.’

‘That’s right. It’s been a good first session,’ she said. ‘I want you to do some thinking. I want you to ask yourself if you see any similarities between the Jiménez family and your own.’

‘Both families have the same number of children … I was the youngest …’

‘We’re not talking about it now.’

‘But I need to make progress.’

‘You’ve done that, but there’s only so much reality that the human mind can take. You have to get used to it first.’

‘Reality?’

‘That’s what we’re striving for.’

‘But what are we in now, if it’s not reality?’ he said, panicked by this thought. ‘I have more daily doses of reality than anybody I know. I’m a homicide detective. Life and death is my business. You don’t get more
real
than that.’

‘But that’s not the reality we’re talking about.’

‘Explain.’

‘The session is over.’

‘Just explain that one thing to me.’

‘I’ll give you a physical analogy,’ she said.

‘Whatever … I have to know this.’

‘Ten years ago I broke a wine glass and, as I was cleaning it up, a tiny sliver got into my thumb. I couldn’t get it out and because of the nerves there the doctor didn’t want to touch it. Over the years it hurt occasionally, nothing more, and all the time the body was protecting itself from that glass. It formed layers of skin around it until it was like a small pea. Then one day the body rejected it. The pea came to the surface and, with the aid of some magnesium sulphate, popped out of my thumb.’

‘And that’s your explanation of the kind of reality we’re talking about?’ he said.

‘Slivers of glass can enter the mind, too,’ she said, and just the concept nauseated him. ‘Sometimes these slivers of glass are too painful to deal with. We push them to the back of our mind. We think we can forget them. Our mind even protects itself from them by scarfing these slivers in layers … I mean, lies. And so we distance ourselves from the sliver until one day something happens and, for no reason at all, it heads for the surface of our conscious mind. The difference between the mental and the physical is that we can’t apply magnesium sulphate to draw the sliver of glass into consciousness.’

He stood and paced the room. Those tiny slivers of glass rising to the surface had triggered some minor terror. It was as if he could feel them crackling in his head like … like an ice field. Was that another physical analogy?

‘You’re frightened,’ she said, ‘which is normal. None of this is easy. It demands great courage. But the rewards are enormous. The reward is eventually a real peace of mind and the restarting of all possibilities.’

He walked down the stairwell, away from the light of Alicia’s door and into the dark of the street, turning over that last line, coming to terms with the fact that she was thinking that he’d reached the point at which the end of possibilities would become a probability.

He hit the street and walked quickly alongside a group of young people heading into the centre of town. Most of the streets were empty, still hung over after the ecstasy and excess of Semana Santa. The bars were still shut, not opening until tomorrow when the Sevillanos would finally get back into the stride of their normal living pace. Falcón found himself in squares which would normally be full of people, even in mid week, but which were nearly silent and dark, with only disjointed voices, as if it was much later, and the street cleaners were out discussing last night’s football. His mind was empty of the usual crush of everyday life, where nothing is thought about and each action begets the next.

The disjointed voices fell silent. He had no desire to go home. He would tramp about like this for some hours. He compared the Jiménez family to his own. Yes, his family had been torn apart, too. No, torn apart was too strong. His mother’s sudden death had not broken them up, but it had damaged them, like the hairline cracks on pottery glaze. He remembered his father’s stricken face, as he’d looked from Paco, to Manuela, to Javier. And he somehow saw his own gaping and fragmented face, as he gasped at the theft of his whole world. The thoughts started up a terrible welling of black ghastliness, so that he quickened his pace over the satin cobbles.

Better times came to mind. The sunny return of Mercedes. The woman who would become his father’s second wife. Javier had instantly fallen for her. And now this memory was tarnished by that photograph he’d found in Raúl Jiménez’s apartment: his father consorting with
Mercedes before his mother was dead. That rucked up something worse and he jogged across the Plaza Nueva, the trunks and branches of the trees gloved in fairy lights. Christmas every day now. He stared blankly into the spot-lit perfection of MaxMara, the pristine clothes on the eternally perfect mannequins. He prayed for a less complicated life, where he didn’t have these thoughts and emotions that flayed his insides, leaving him looking almost the same from the outside, but raw and internally bleeding like a bomb-blast victim.

Sweat popped out of his forehead as he walked, half trotted, down Calle Zaragoza, and something like hunger opened out in his stomach, so he thought about going to El Cairo and having a
tapa
of
merluza rellena de gambas.
He preferred the
sangre encebollada,
but blood and onions on a night like this required a stronger stomach. He passed Ramón Salgado’s gallery with only a single lit piece of sculpture in the window. Further on was a classic Sevillano house, which had been converted into a café with an expensive restaurant above, peopled by businessmen and lawyers with their wives and girlfriends.

Back-lit, standing in the doorway on the top step, being helped into her coat, was Inés. Her hair was up and she only wore it like that when she wanted to be attractive and sexy, never for work. He didn’t see the man she was with as they stepped into the darkness of the street, joined arms and headed towards Reyes Católicos. There was no one else. This was a dinner for two. He stopped dead as Inés glanced behind her and then her high heels tickled the cobbles as she broke into a momentary skipping run to catch up. He followed them from across the street. The earlier hunger and the beginnings of exhaustion were forgotten now as the mind fell on new fuel.

They crossed Reyes Católicos and walked past the bar, La Tienda, which was closed. They cut across Calle Bailén
and went behind the museum and out on to the Plaza del Museo, so that he had to hang back until they disappeared down Calle San Vicente. He waited and then followed, but by then the street was empty. He walked up and down the first hundred metres wondering if he’d imagined it all or that maybe the man had an apartment here, in this street, barely a kilometre from his own house.

He retreated home, broken as an entire army; the hunger was gone and the exhaustion of defeat had taken over. He showered, but only the day’s grime left him. He took a sleeping pill and crept under the covers. He stared at the endlessly receding ceiling, mesmerized as he could be by the white flashes in the middle of the road unrolling in the flare of the headlights. He thought he should resist, that it was dangerous to fall asleep at the wheel. Confusion distorted his sense of place. He reached forward with a hand, expecting everything to career out of control, for the frame of his vision to suddenly include a barrier, a bank and a life-ending tree to crash into. He flew into sleep as if through an empty windscreen, into the night.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

12th October 1943, Triana, Seville

An army truck gave me a lift from Toledo all the way to Seville, which was lucky. The country is on its knees, with no petrol and little food. There’s not much on the roads, apart from occasional carts drawn by emaciated horses or mules.

I’ve taken a room run by a fat Moorish-looking woman with long black hair down to the small of her back, which she winds up into a bun. She has black eyes as dull as charcoal and she sweats constantly, as if on the brink of collapse. Her breasts have parted company and live in isolation on either side of her ribcage. She has a belly as big as a drinker’s, which sways under her black skirts as she walks. Her ankles are purple and swollen and she catches her breath in pain as she moves from room to room. I would like to draw and paint her, preferably naked, but she has a male companion, who is as thin as a village dog and carries a knife, which I hear him whetting lovingly every morning before he goes out. The room has a chest of drawers, none of which opens, and a bed with a picture of the Virgin above it. I take it because it has a patio outside, which only the landlady uses to dry her washing. I dump my bags and go out to buy materials and drink.

25th October 1943, Triana, Seville

It must be the soldier in me but I’ve settled into a routine although I do not get up early any more. Nothing happens in this city until after 10 a.m. I walk to the Bodega Salinas on the Calle San Jacinto, drink a coffee and smoke a cigarette. I use this bar because the owner, Manolo, keeps the best barrels of tinto from which he fills my five-litre bottles. He also sells me a homemade aguardiente, which I buy by the litre. I go back to my room and work until 3 in the afternoon. The only interruption is by the water seller. At 3 I eat lunch in the bar with a jug of tinto, refill my bottle and return to my room to sleep until 6 p.m. I work again until 10, have dinner and stay on at Manolo’s, drinking with the crooks and idiots who gather there.

29th October 1943, Triana, Seville

In the Bodega Salinas yesterday one of the other customers known only by the name of Tarzan (after the film
Tarzan the Ape Man)
comes to sit at my table. He has a tremendous belly and a face like a cluster of potatoes (Johnny Weismuller would be appalled). His eyes are closed up and puffy. He sits down and everybody is listening.

‘So,’ he says, putting a meaty forearm on the table, ‘where do you get that look from?’

‘What look is that?’ I ask, puzzled by the question.

There’s nothing aggressive about Tarzan, despite his pummelled face. He wears a black hat that he never removes but slips to the back of his head occasionally in order to scratch the front.

‘A look that says you don’t belong here,’ he replies calmly, but I sense those puffy eyes looking through their slits as if down a rifle barrel.

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘You’re not from Seville. You are not Andaluz.’

‘I come from Morocco, Tetuán and Ceuta,’ I say, but this doesn’t satisfy.

‘You look at us and make notes. You have old eyes in a young head.’

‘I am an artist,’ I say. ‘I make notes to remind myself of things that I have seen.’

‘What have you seen?’ he asks.

I realize now that these people do not think I am who I say I am. They think I’m Guardia Civil (who are always from out of town) or worse.

‘I was a soldier,’ I say, avoiding the word Legion. ‘I’ve been in Russia with the División Azul.’

‘Where?’ asks a bandy-legged guy, who is a picador of some repute.

‘Dubrovka, Teremets and Krasni Bor,’ I say.

‘I was in Shevelevo,’ he says, and we shake hands.

Everybody is relieved. Why they should think a member of the secret police would sit openly in a bar making notes on them (the densest group of dullards in Southern Spain) I have no idea.

15th December 1943, Triana, Seville

A young man, perhaps twenty years old, comes into the bar. He calls himself Raúl and they all know him and like him. He’s been in Madrid working, but all he can talk about that first night is going to Tangier, where there is real money to be made. They humour him and tell him he should talk to El Marroquí, which is my new name. R. sits at my table and tells me of the fortunes to be made from smuggling out of Tangier. I tell him I have plenty of money and that I’m only interested in becoming an artist. He tells me that there’s lots to be made out of American cigarettes, but there’s money in everything because of the American blockade of Spanish ports. His only worry is that now that the Blue Division has been pulled out of Russia this might relax the American attitude to Franco and they’ll lift the blockade. I sit up at this because I realize that he is not just an idiot with pesetas on his mind but someone who understands the real situation. I offer him a drink; his company is more lively than the usual Bodega Salinas customer. I learn that the free port status of Tangier means that all these goods can come in and be freely traded, with no duty or tax. The companies who buy and sell these goods also don’t have to pay any taxes. Everything is very cheap. All you have to do is buy it, ship it across the straits and you can sell it at a premium. This all sounds fine except he has no money to buy and no ship to transport the goods. This he waves away as uninteresting detail. ‘You start by working for others,’ he says. ‘You see how the business operates and then you fit yourself in.