The Blind Man of Seville (41 page)

Just after 1 a.m. a taxi stopped at the junction of Calle San Vicente and Calle Alfonso XII. Inés got out and waited on the pavement. Calderón paid the driver from the back of the cab. Falcón came out from under the trees, his hair wet, and stood in the shadows of the kiosk on the plaza.

Calderón took Inés by the hand. She was staring up and down the street and across the plaza. They turned and walked up Calle San Vicente. Falcón loped across the square in a crouching run and found the shadows on the opposite side of the street to the lovers. He walked behind the cars parked on the pavement. They stopped. Calderón took out his keys. Inés turned and her eyes found him paralysed between a car and the wall of a building. He ducked and ran for the nearest doorway where he stood, back up against the wall, pressing himself flat into the darkness, heart and lungs fighting like a sack of wild animals. Inés told Calderón to go up. Her heels stabbed the street and stopped by the pavement close to him.

‘I know you’re there,’ she said.

The blood thundered in his ears.

‘This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you, Javier.’

He squeezed his eyes shut, the child about to be found out, punished.

‘Your face keeps coming out of the night,’ she said. ‘You’re following me and I won’t put up with it. You’ve destroyed my life once and I won’t let you do it again. This is a warning. If I see you again, I will go straight to the courts and apply for a restraining order. Do you understand that? I will humiliate you as you did me.’

The spiky heels backed away and then returned, this time a little closer.

‘I hate you,’ she whispered. ‘Do you know how much I hate you? Are you listening, Javier? I am going upstairs now and Esteban is going to take me to his bed. Did you hear that? He does things to me that you could never even dream of.’

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

26th June 1946, Tangier

I have terrible lower back pain and go to the Spanish doctor on Calle Sevilla, not so far from R.’s house. He examines me, takes me into an adjoining room and lays me face down on a cloth covered bench. Another door opens and he introduces me to his daughter, Pilar, who works with him as his nurse. She rubs an oil into my back which generates a tremendous heat. She rubs the oil in down to my coccyx. By the end of this treatment I am embarrassed by the state of my manhood. Her small hands have magic in them. She tells me I have to come to her for a session every day for a week. Were all afflictions like this.

3rd July 1946, Tangier

After endless negotiations I have persuaded Pilar to come and sit for me, but a boy arrives at lunchtime to say she cannot come. In the late afternoon Carlos Gallardo comes to visit. He is another of those ‘fellow artists’, but he is not Antonio Fuentes. There is none of the ascetic about him. He is louche. He drinks heavily and usually in the Bar La Mar Chica, which was where we met. We have smoked hashish together and looked at each other’s work without comment.

He has brought a Moroccan lad with him who carries his groceries, which he leaves at the door. We sit on low wooden chairs in one of the dark cool rooms away from the heat of the patio. My houseboy puts a hookah between us and fills it with a tobacco-hashish mix. We smoke. The hashish does its work and I feel pleasant. Desultory thoughts float into my mind like aquarium fish. C.’s boy is standing by his chair with one of his brown feet resting on the other. He has had his hair shorn, probably by C., against lice. He is smiling at me. He can’t be more than sixteen years old. I reset my vision and realize that C. has his hand up the boy’s robe and is caressing his buttocks. I didn’t know this about C. It does not disgust me. I make some comment. ‘Yes,’ he says,’ of course I like women, but there’s something inhibiting about sex with a woman. I put it down to us Spanish and our mothers. But with these local youths it’s so normal, something that has always happened and to which no stigma attaches. I feel free to indulge. I am a sensualist after all. You must have seen that from my work.’ I muster some reply and he continues: ‘Whereas you, my friend, are frozen solid. Bleak and chill. I hear the wind whistling through your canvases. You should be thawing in this heat, but I can’t see it. Perhaps you should take a boy for some guilt-free sensuality.’ We smoke some more and my skin feels like velvet. C. says, ‘Take Ahmed to your room now and lie down with him.’ The idea sends a bolt of electricity through me. I find I am not appalled by the suggestion, quite the opposite. The boy comes over. I can barely speak but manage to turn down the offer.

5th July 1946, Tangier

P. comes with her mother. The heat is not so smothering and we sit in the patio under the fig tree. We talk. The women’s eyes dart about like birds in a bush. I feel like a large cat planning dinner. P.’s mother is here to find out about me …

Because R.’s company, in which I am a partner, is one of the best known in Tangier’s Spanish community, she is soon eating out of my hand as if it is chock-full of millet. I keep away from all the dull socializing and am not known. Were she to go down to the chabolas on the outskirts of town they would run away in fright at the mention of El Marroquí. But P.’s mother lives between her house and the Spanish cathedral so I am safe and I cannot see her ever straying into the Bar La Mar Chica.

She asks to see my work and I politely refuse, but relent under pressure. P. stands transfixed in front of the monochrome shapes and patterns while her mother rushes around trying to find something she understands. She settles on the drawing of a Touareg, which at least has some colour in it. I sign it and give it to her and ask to paint a portrait of her daughter. She says she will raise the matter with her husband.

They leave and moments later there is a fierce knocking on the door. It is the young lad who came round with C. the other day, Ahmed. He is eating a peach and the juice is dribbling down his chin and is smeared across his cheeks. He licks his lips. It is not subtle but it is effective. I haul him off the street and follow him, trembling, through the endless rooms and passages. He understands something of the urgency and runs kicking up his robe with his bare feet. By the time I arrive at the bedroom his caramel body lies beneath the mosquito netting. I fall on him like a demolished building. Afterwards I give him a few pesetas and he goes away happy.

3rd August 1946, Tangier

Trust has been established between myself and the doctor and P. is allowed to visit the house on her own to sit for her portrait. The sessions take place in the afternoon when the surgery is closed and can only last an hour. It is very hot. I have to work in one of the rooms close to the patio for the light. I am drawing. She sits on a wooden chair. I am close to her face. She does not flinch. We do not speak until I look at her hands. They rest in her lap, small, long-fingered, delicate instruments of pleasure.

Me: Who taught you to massage?

P.: Why do you think anybody taught me?

Me: The expertise in your fingers strikes me as coming from instruction rather than trial and error.

P.: Who taught you to paint?

Me: I had some help on how to look at things.

P.: I was taught by a gypsy woman in Granada.

Me: Is that where you’re from?

P.: Originally, yes. My father was a doctor in Melilla for some years before we came here.

Me: And your father allowed you to mix with the gypsies?

P.: I am quite independent, despite what my parents might want you to think.

Me: You ‘re allowed out?

P.: I do as I please. I am twenty-three years old.

The boy arrives with mint tea. We lapse into silence. I work on her hands and then we drink the tea.

P.: You draw figuratively but paint abstracts.

Me: I teach myself to see with the drawings and interpret it with the paint.

P.: What have you seen today?

Me: I have been looking at structure.

P.: How well am I built?

Me: With delicacy and strength.

P.: Do you know why I like you?

The question silences me.

P.: You have strength and individuality, but you are vulnerable, too.

Me: Vulnerable?

P.: You have suffered, but there is still the small boy in you.

This intimate exchange seals something between us. She has told me something she has kept from her parents. She has seen something in me which I have not denied. But she is wrong. I
am
those things … but I am not individual … not yet.

10th August 1946, Tangier

I am hobbling around again with my bad back. I have a lump on the right side of my spine. P. arrives for her sitting and immediately sees my problem. She leaves and returns with her little wooden case of bottles of oils. The bedroom is out of bounds. I lie on the floor. She tries to work on me from the side but it is hopeless. She tells me to shut my eyes. I hear her skirt slide down her legs. She lowers herself until she is astride the backs of my thighs. Only her bare legs touch mine on the outside. I can feel the heat of her above me. She kneads the lump in my back with the tips of her fingers while I take root in the ground.

She finishes with me. My whole body has been claimed by the floor. She puts her skirt on and tells me to get to my feet. We stand in front of each other. I have myself under control physically, but mentally I am in disarray. She tells me to walk around. I do this and there is no pain apart from a dull ache in my testicles. She tells me to keep walking. Activity is the secret of the healthy back. I must not sit to paint or draw. She leaves. I smoke some hashish until I feel liquid, like olive oil flowing greenly from room to room.

Ahmed turns up later with a friend. He is mischievous, this boy. I wonder whether C. is putting him up to it as an artistic experiment. Where P. and I are physically so demure, these boys are completely uninhibited. I smoke and they perform for me, their muscular adolescent bodies entwining like rope. They turn their attention to me. The release is explosive and they giggle like children playing around a fountain. Before they leave Ahmed presses a stoned date between my teeth. I lie there with the dreamy sweetness leaching into me, replete and satiated as a slumbering pasha.

11th August 1946, Tangier

It has been reported to me that two of my legionnaires have fought over a lover in a hotel room in town. The fight was long and bloody and the floor of the room was as slippery as a butcher’s. One of my legionnaires is dead, the lover is badly wounded and the other legionnaire is in gaol. I ask the police chief if I can see the lover, thinking that this might be an international incident if she dies; he tells me not to worry as the ‘lover’ is a Riffian boy. He shrugs, arches his eyebrows, opens his hands …
es la vida.

I pay a bribe and the legionnaire is released on condition that he leaves the International Zone immediately. I take him to Tetuán and give him some money. On the trip over he tells me he was with the División Azul in Russia and stayed on with the Legión Española de Voluntarios and, after they were disbanded, he joined the SS. He was with the infamous Capt. Miguel Ezguera Sánchez when the Russians stormed Berlin. He shows me a handful of the leading currency at the end — cyanide pellets. He gives me two samples as an odd souvenir and as a
novio de la muerte,
a bizarre way of thanking me.

1st September 1946, Tangier

R. has taken out a loan and bought two more boats. I have been to Ceuta again and recruited more legionnaires. We train them to run the boats and pay them well for it. They like the work. They still have a weapon in their hands and there is adventure, although, because of our reputation for violence, nobody comes near us. The pirates pick on the small fry. My importance to the business is now paramount because trust is a rare commodity. The strong allegiances between legionnaires means we can rely on them and they will not steal. It releases R. and I from the grind of running the ships. R. is investing in property. We are building and I have to secure the construction sites. R. plays the gold and currency markets with the endless stream of cash that comes in from the smuggling operations. I do not understand these markets and have no inclination to involve myself.

Now that Barbara Hutton, the Woolworth heiress, has taken up residence in the Sidi Hosni Palace, R. tells me that Tangier will be the new Côte d’Azur. He plans to move more heavily into property ‘to build hotels for all the people who will come here to warm their hands on our affluence’. He also tells me that
La Rica
bought the palace for $100,000 — a quite unimaginable sum for all us Tangerinos to contemplate. The
Caudillo,
as General Franco is now called, had offered $50,000. He must be sitting in his El Pardo Palace fuming.

3rd September 1946, Tangier

P. comes for another sitting. As soon as I open the door I see daring in her eyes, but also amusement and mockery. It is hot in the middle of the afternoon. We start to work in the usual silence until I lose concentration and she walks around the room looking for anything she hasn’t seen before. She finds a lump of hashish amongst the brushes and pots on the table and sniffs it. She knows what it is but has never tried it. She asks to smoke some. I’ve never seen her with a cigarette even, but I charge the hookah for her. Minutes later she’s complaining that nothing has happened. I tell her to be patient and she releases a small moan as I imagine she would at the first sexual contact. Her eyes have distance in them as if she has retreated into her mind. She licks her lips slowly and sensually. I want to put my own mouth there. I drift and watch the light change in the room. P. says: ‘I think you should draw me as I really am.’ This I’ve been trying to do for weeks. In fast fluid movements she stands up, removes her blouse, lets her skirt fall, unharnesses her brassiere and steps out of her underwear. I am speechless. She stands in front of me, her long dark hair on her naked shoulders, her hands resting on the tops of her thighs, framing the triangle of her pubic hair. She slowly puts her fingertips to her shoulders and moves them down over her breasts to the brown pointed nipples, which harden to her touch. Her fingers trace the outline of her body. We are both so engaged in the sensuality of the moment that I think they are my fingers. ‘This is who I am,’ she says. I grab sticks of charcoal and sheets of paper. My hand flashes over them with bold, fluid movements. I must have drawn her six, seven, eight times in a matter of minutes. As I finish, each drawing slips to the floor. She continues to hold herself, utterly beautiful, and naked, with the supreme confidence of complete womanhood and it is that mysterious essence that I am ‘seeing’ and am able to draw. Then, as occasionally happens with hashish, we are in a different moment. She is pulling her clothes back on. She moves to leave and I stand with the drawings at my feet. She looks down at them and then up at me. ‘Now you know,’ she says. Her lips brush mine with the softness of sable and the coolness of water. The lightning touch of the tip of her tongue on mine stays with me for hours.