The Blind Man of Seville (19 page)

But he hadn’t. He’d woken up. There’d been no impact. His mother had told him — his first mother or his second mother? — one of them had told him that as long as you didn’t hit the ground in a dream you’d be all right. Ridiculous. You’re in bed. The things you’ll believe.

He knelt down and tied up his shoelaces, knotted them tight, enclasped his feet so that they were sure and steady, reliable. This was not a time for stumbling about, slopping around in the yellow leather babouches he’d bought because they reminded him of his father, which was what he’d worn as he worked — barefoot or babouches, never anything else.

It was exasperating, this constant resurfacing.

He went out of the room into the arched gallery overlooking the patio. It was warm. The air breathing around the pillars was as soft as a young girl come to kiss him. He sucked in the exotic air that suddenly filled his head with the scent of possibility. The black pupil of the still water in the fountain in the patio looked up at the night. He shivered. All these houses look in on themselves, he thought. I’m walled in. The sides encroach. I have to get out. I have to get out of myself.

He started down the stairs but turned back to the gallery, to his father’s studio. The drawer of keys had gone. Encarnación. Strange, he thought, with a name like that and I so rarely see her. Here she is, supposedly endlessly assuming bodily form, but she never appears. I only see evidence of her activity. He walked to the gate because he could see now that a key had been left in the lock and hanging from a piece of string, another key. He stroked his palms with the tips of his fingers. Damp. His hands
had always been dry and cool. Inés had remarked on it. When they were lovers he used to be able to just run his hands down her hot back and it would make her press her stomach into the bed, push her bottom up to him, offer her sex to him. Those cool, dry hands on her skin. By the end of their marriage she was calling him the fishmonger. ‘Don’t touch me with those blocks of ice!’

He turned the key. One, two and a half. The latch clicked open. The door swung noiselessly. Who had oiled those hinges? The fantastic Encarnación? His heart pounded as if he knew something was about to happen. He took the key from the lock, closed the wrought-iron gate.

At this end of the gallery his father had put bars over the openings of the arches, obsessed with security as he always was. Falcón walked the length of it, the flat black water of the fountain rippling in his vision. He paced back to the door in the middle, the heavy mahogany door with its prominent panels jutting out, saying ‘Do not enter’ or perhaps even more demanding: ‘Do not enter unprepared’.

The second key slid into the lock, turned easily. It was all encouraging. He pushed on the heavy door, the first resistance. It opened on an absurd creak, like a vampire’s coffin. He giggled. Nervous as Leda when she saw that swan bracing its wings. One of his father’s little jokes about women who trembled under the surge of his charisma. He fumbled for the switch.

A huge empty wall spattered with paint came up under the halogen glare of the lights. The end where his father used to work. Five metres by four metres of worked-on wall. The vestiges of four canvas squares seemed to float under the dribbles and slashes of paint. One end of the wall closest to the window was almost totally black, thick with paint as if he’d worked there on ideas crowded with pending doom. There was a predominance of red over the rest of the wall, which was not a colour that had
featured much in any of his work since the Tangier nudes — voluptuous lines laid over blocks of Moroccan colour — touareg blue, desert ochre, raw sienna, terracotta and then the reds, the whole range of blood reds from capillary crimson, to vein vermilion, to deep arterial amaranthine. They all said it was in the reds. The life flow. But he hadn’t used red since Tangier. The paintings he made of details of Seville rarely used red. The abstract landscapes were green and grey, brown and black and always suffused with a mysterious light from an unknown source. Light which the
ABC
critic called ‘numinous’ and
El País,
‘Disney’. ‘You can’t teach people to see,’ his father had said. ‘They will only see what they want to. The mind is always interfering with vision. You should know that, Javier, in your job. Witnesses who’ve seen things so clearly, but once put under cross-examination are found hardly to have been there. You’d learn more from a blind man. Remember
Twelve Angry Men?
Yes. But why “angry”? Because people believe deeply in the veracity of their own vision. If you can’t rely on your own eyes, whose can you?’

In remembering these words Falcón had stopped in mid stride, as ridiculous as those mime artists down Calle Sierpes. His mind turned and spun around the crux, a truth that would enable him to see into the mind of Raúl Jiménez’s killer. The one who would make his victim see, who would force him through the mind’s interference, to see an unacceptable truth. But he didn’t reach it and came round as surprised as an anaesthetized patient given time out from the world.

He circled the notched tables covered with jars and clay pots stuffed with sheaves of brushes all dried hard, crisp with encrusted paint. Underneath the tables there were cardboard boxes and piles of books, catalogues and magazines, obscure art periodicals and reams of paper,
rolls of canvas, sheets of hardboard. It would take him half a day just to carry the stuff downstairs, let alone look through it all. But that was the point. He was not supposed to look through it. It was to be taken away and incinerated. Not dumped but destroyed beyond recognition.

Falcón ran his hands through his hair again and again, maddened by what he was about to embark on, aware that the reason he’d come in here was specifically to disobey his father’s wishes. He’d been avoiding this moment since his father’s death, needing to get further from the end of that era so that he could start on his own. His own era? Did ordinary men like him even have their own era?

He crouched down and pulled out a single magazine from a pile. It was a
New Yorker,
his father a great fan of the cartoons, the more surreal the better. He’d particularly enjoyed a drawing of a chess pawn standing next to a desert cactus with the caption: ‘Queen’s pawn to Albuquerque, New Mexico.’ The dazzling brilliance of its meaninglessness — he’d thought it such a perfect attitude to life, perhaps because his own had been brought close to meaninglessness by the loss of his dazzling genius.

The memories crowded, jostled for a ticket.

A row about Hemingway. Why Hemingway had shot himself in 1961, the year that his mother had died. A man who had achieved so much and had killed himself because he couldn’t stand not being able to do it any more. Javier had been sixteen when they talked about it.

Javier: ‘Why couldn’t he just retire? The guy was over sixty. Why didn’t he just hang up his pencil case, settle himself into a lounger in the Cuban sunshine and drink a few
mojitos?’

Father: ‘Because he was sure that what he’d lost could be refound. Should be refound.’

Javier: ‘Well, that alone should have kept him occupied.
Hunt the treasure … that’s a game everybody enjoys.’

Father: ‘It’s not a
game,
Javier. This is not a game.’

Javier: ‘His place in literature was assured. He had the Nobel Prize. With
The Old Man and the Sea
his work was done. There was nothing more to be said. Why try to say more if there’s …?’

Father: ‘Because he had it and he lost it. It’s like losing a child … you never get over what could have been.’

Javier: ‘And look at you, Papá. You’re no different and yet …’

Father: ‘Let’s not talk about me.’

Falcón threw down the magazine at his crassness remembered. He pulled out a box, flipped open its flaps. All this stuff. The accumulation of a lifetime’s rubbish, even more so with an artist who would hold on to anything that might precipitate a new idea. He walked the book-lined walls at the side and back of the room. ‘Should I burn these, too?’ he asked himself. ‘Is that what you want me to be — a book burner? Throw them all from the gallery into the patio and have a bonfire of words and pictures? You cannot have meant me to do this.’ The persuasiveness of the guilty mind that was about to transgress.

The wall on the street side had four floor-to-ceiling windows, which his father had installed to maximize natural light. Each window was encased in a steel lattice that could be slid back. The room no less than a fortress.

He arrived back in front of his father’s work wall and went through a door in the corner, which was windowless and lit by a single unshaded bulb. Four racks of vertical slots had been built along one wall. Stretched canvases and other material leaned in them. A plans chest occupied most of the opposite wall. It was piled high with boxes, almost to the ceiling. It smelt musty, stale and, after the
long winter, damp. He went to the racks and pulled out a sheet of paper at random. It was a charcoal outline of one of the Tangier nudes. He pulled out another sheet. A pencil drawing of the same nude. Another and another sheet, each one a reworking of the same nude, a development of a detail, an examination of an angle. He went to the canvasses. The same Tangier nude painted again and again, sometimes big, sometimes small but always the same nude. Falcón searched the other racks and found that the four racks in which his father had arranged the work corresponded to each of the four Falcón nudes. Each rack contained hundreds of drawings and charcoals, oils and acrylics.

A tremendous sadness suddenly overwhelmed him. This work, the wall of racks in this dimly lit room, was what was left of his father’s attempt to refind his genius, to get it down right, even once more, even if it was just a tiny detail, to have it again. There was pain on the back of that surge of sadness, because Falcón could see, even in the pathetic light from the cheap bulb, that not one of these pieces contained anything of the exceptional qualities of the originals. Everything was in its place, but there was no life, no leap, no surge, no flow. This was mediocre. His abstract landscapes were better than this. His cupolas and windows, doors and buttresses, even they were better than this. He would burn these; he would burn them without a second thought.

He climbed up on a stool and lifted down one of the boxes from the plans chest. Heavy. More books. He flipped open the box, rooted through them, some leather-bound, others cloth, some by writers from the sixties and seventies, others classics. He opened a cover and found the personal dedication. They were gifts from admirers: aristocrats, ministers, theatre directors, poets. He tore open another box of carefully packed porcelain. Another box
contained silverware. Cigars — unsmoked. Cigarette cases. Wood carvings. Figurines. His father loathed china figurines. Three boxes full of them. The early ones in newspaper from the seventies, the later stuff in bubblewrap. He realized what he was looking at. This was homage paid to his father. These were the small gifts bestowed on him when he attended public occasions. They were small expressions of gratitude for his genius.

More memories. Going away with his father. He rarely paid for a meal or a hotel room, which were always festooned with flowers. If they stayed in a private house the locals would silently leave offerings of fruit and vegetables to show their appreciation of a visit from the great man.

‘This is how it is,’ his father would say. ‘Greatness is constantly rewarded. If I were a footballer or a torero it would be no different. Genius is the thing — with foot, cape, pen or brush, it doesn’t matter, and yet … what is it? Great artists paint lacklustre paintings, brilliant toreros make terrible messes of great bulls, magnificent authors write bad books, sublime footballers can play like shit. So what is this … this
fickle
genius?’

Yes, he would get angry with it, hold up his hand with thumb and forefinger pinched together so that the ends turned white and Javier thought he might be about to say that genius was nothing.

‘Genius is an interstice.’

‘A what?’

‘A crack. A tiny opening to which, if you are blessed, you may put your eye and see the essence of it all.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You wouldn’t, Javier, because you are blessed with normality. The interstice for a footballer is in that moment when he knows, without being conscious of it, exactly where the ball is going to be, how he should run at it, where he should place his feet, where the goalkeeper is,
the precise moment he should strike the ball. Calculations that are seemingly impossible become fantastically simple. The movement is effortless, the timing sublime, the action so … slow. Have you noticed that? Have you noticed the silence in these moments? Or do you only remember the roar as the ball caresses the net?’

Another one of those endless conversations with his father. Falcón shook his head to rid himself of it. He went through all the boxes, vaguely uneasy at his father’s methodical organization. His father had usually worked in a great miasma of paint, hashish, music and, in Seville, mostly at night and yet in this storeroom he was the bean counter. And as if to confirm this fact he opened a box that was full to the top of money. He didn’t have to count it because there was a note on top that told him it contained eighty-five million pesetas. A huge sum of money, one that could have bought a small palace or a luxury apartment. He recalled Salgado’s talk of black money. Was this to be destroyed, too?

The last box contained more books, leather-bound but untooled and untitled. The spines were smooth, too. He flicked one open at random. The pages were covered in his father’s immaculate handwriting. A single line jumped out at him:

I am so close.

He snapped the book shut and reopened it at the first page, which was inscribed:
Seville 1970—.
Journals. His father had kept diaries, which he’d never known about. Sweat popped out of his forehead again and he smeared it away. His hands were damp. He went back to the box to see what order they were in and realized he was holding the last one. He flipped through the pages to December 1972 and the last words of the journal: