The Blind Man of Seville (44 page)

‘So you
can
confirm that the killer cuts the eyelids off his victims?’ asked the journalist, and the press conference was prematurely terminated.

Falcón and Ramírez split the workload. Ramírez was happy to take Fernández down to the gallery on Calle Zaragoza when he heard that Salgado had a blonde, blue-eyed secretary called Greta. Baena and Serrano continued the search of the house with Felipe and Jorge while the trunk was taken down to the study and the contents laid out on the desk. A further search of the attic uncovered no camera or projection equipment, but there was an old reel-to-reel tape recorder which Felipe managed to get working.

The diary seemed the obvious place to start but was very badly kept up. The first entry showed why Salgado had started it. He was happy. He was getting married to a woman called Carmen Blázquez. Falcón, who’d never known that Salgado had had a wife, grunted as he read the words — Salgado already proud, pompous and unctuous at the age of thirty-three.
‘Francisco Falcón has done me the great honour of agreeing to be my
testigo.
His genius will make the occasion one of the talked-about events of the Seville social calendar.’
It was no wonder he hadn’t kept up the entries. The man had nothing to say. The only time he was moving was when he talked about his new wife. Then, all the artifice was stripped away and he wrote
in unembellished prose.
‘I love Carmen more with every day that passes.’ ‘She is a good person, which makes her sound dull but it is her goodness which affects everyone who meets her. As Francisco says: “She makes me forget the uglinesses of my life. When I’m in her company I feel as if I have only ever been a good man.”’

Falcón tried to imagine his father saying those words and decided they were Salgado’s invention. He opened up the manila envelope of photographs and found one of Carmen dated June 1965 in which she looked to be in her late twenties. There was nothing striking about her face except her eyebrows, which were short, dark and completely horizontal with no arch to them at all. They gave her an earnest, concerned look, as if she would look after her husband well.

Another entry dated 25th December 1967:
‘Last night before dinner I was taken back to childhood. My parents always allowed us one present on Christmas Eve and Carmen has given me the best gift of my life. She is pregnant. We are deliriously happy and I get quite drunk on champagne.’

The diary charted Carmen’s uneventful pregnancy, which was intercut with stupefying details of successful art shows and sale values. Salgado mentioned the purchase of the tape recorder, which he’d bought intending to record Carmen’s singing, which he never managed to do due to her self-consciousness in front of the microphone. Salgado was also entranced by Carmen’s pregnant belly, which was enormous. He even asked her if she’d let Francisco Falcón draw her. She was appalled at the suggestion. The final entry read:
‘The doctor has agreed to allow me to record my child’s first cry in the world. They are bemused by the request. It seems that men are never present at the birth. I ask Francisco where he was for the birth of his children and he says he can’t remember. When I ask if it was at Pilar’s bedside he is stunned by the notion. Am I the only man in Spain to be fascinated by such a momentous occasion? And Francisco, an artist of such genius, I would have thought he would find birth as compelling as inspiration.’

A strange note to end on. Falcón counted back the months and reckoned that if Carmen had announced her pregnancy at the end of December then the baby should have been born in July. He went through the contents of the trunk to see if there was a record of the child’s birth. In a stained blue folder was his answer — Carmen Blázquez’s death certificate dated 5th July 1968. The medical report beneath it detailed a catastrophic birth marred by high blood pressure, fluid retention, septicaemia and finally death for both mother and child.

The thought of the padlocked trunk high up in the attic of Salgado’s house took on a terrible poignancy for Falcón. The loneliness of the man — the solitary diner, the forlorn shopper, the desolate hanger-on — whose whole life had been dedicated to the genius of Francisco Falcón, walked the streets with his only possibility of happiness boxed away in a dry dusty place.

He turned to the next photograph from the manila envelope under the horizontal eyebrows of the undemanding Carmen Blázquez and there they were on their wedding day. Ramón and Carmen holding hands. Their whole happiness contained in that pocket. It was astonishing for Falcón to see Salgado so young. The subsequent thirty-five years had ruined his looks. The misery had been a weight he carried in his face.

The stack of tapes demanded Falcón’s attention, but he continued to flip through the photographs until he came to a shot of his father sitting with Carmen in a garden, the two of them laughing. It was true of his father that he’d always been drawn to ‘good’ women. His mother, Mercedes … even the eccentric Encarnación was tolerated because she was ‘a good woman’. He carried on
through the stack of photographs and realized that this was Salgado’s entire collection of shots of Carmen. They were all different sizes and taken with a variety of cameras. Salgado must have systematically removed her from the photographic record of his life.

The tapes. The thought of the tapes made his hands sweat. He didn’t want to hear what was on those tapes. His hands trembled as he threaded the tape through the heads. He played it and was relieved to find that it was completely silent.

The second tape burst straight into a conversation between Salgado and Carmen. He was imploring her to sing. She was refusing. Her heels paced a wooden floor while Salgado pleaded with her, right down to begging her for something that he could remember her by if she happened to die before him. The conversation bled into classical music, followed by some flamenco and Falcón fast-forwarded to the end.

The third tape started with Albinoni’s Adagio. There followed other stirring pieces by Mahler and Tchaikovsky. He barely managed to feed the fourth tape through the heads, his hands were so slippery. He pressed ‘play’ and heard only the ethereal hiss, but then came everything that he’d dreaded. There was screaming and exhortation and panic. There was the rushing of feet on hard floors, steel trays clanging on tiles, tables and screens toppling, material ripping. There was one last cry of someone being swept out to sea with no life line, with only the sight of their lover, helpless and diminishing on the shore: ‘Ramón! Ramón! Ramón!’ And then a harsh click and silence.

The glass desktop provided support. Carmen’s final cries had hit him like three body blows and broken him in the middle. His organs felt ruptured.

He concentrated on his breathing — the calming effect
of valuing a motor reflex. He turned the machine off, wiped sweat from his top lip. He was nearly overwhelmed by guilt at how brutal he’d been to this old friend of his father. All those times he’d seen him outside Calle Bailén and thought, no, not that pain in the arse. But then there were the appalling contents of the computer. What had happened to this man after he’d lost his wife? Had his misery goaded him? Had it prodded him down this worthless road to the ultimate, lonely depravity of auto-strangulation whilst calamitous images of ruined children passed before his eyes? Maybe it was in his nature and he’d seen that terrible capacity, but then Carmen had come into his life and given him a shot at goodness and he’d had her brutally torn from him. Yes, disappointment would seem a paltry word to describe Ramón Salgado’s state as he left that hospital in the dreadful heat of a Sevillano July and taken his first feverish steps down towards hell.

Baena came in with a large plastic bag.

‘We’ve finished in the house, Inspector Jefe,’ he said and handed over the bag. ‘Serrano’s done the garden with Jorge. The only thing of interest was this. It’s a whip. The sort religious nuts use to flagellate themselves.
Mea culpa. Mea culpa.’

‘Where was it?’

‘In the back of the built-in wardrobe in the bedroom,’ said Baena. ‘No thorn tiaras or hair shirts though, sir.’

Falcón grunted a laugh and told Baena to make an inventory of the trunk and take it back to the Jefatura. He left Serrano to seal up the house and drove back to the centre of town. He parked in Reyes Católicos and had a quick
tapa
of
solomillo al whisky
and then walked up Calle Zaragoza to Salgado’s gallery, where the showroom was in darkness.

Greta, Salgado’s Swiss-born secretary, was sitting at
her desk at the back of the showroom with her hands jammed between her knees, staring into space. Her eyes were puffy and wrecked from crying.

‘You should go home,’ said Falcón, but she didn’t want to be on her own. She told him it was her tenth anniversary working for Ramón Salgado. They had a celebration planned for this year’s Feria. She drifted off into old memories and stock phrases about ‘what a good man Ramón was’. Falcón asked if there were any artists that she could think of who hadn’t liked Ramón, who perhaps had been rejected by him?

‘People come off the street all the time. Students, young people. I deal with them. They don’t understand how the business works, that Ramón is not operating at that level. Some of them storm out, as if we don’t deserve their genius. Others get talking and, if I like them, I let them show me their stuff. If it’s good I tell them who they could show it to. Ramón never saw any of these people.’

‘How many of them show you installations using film, video or computer graphics?’

‘More than half. Not many of the kids paint these days.’

‘That’s not Ramón’s style, is it?’

‘It’s not his clients’ style. They’re the conservative ones. They can’t see its value. At this level it’s mostly about money and investment … and a CD with some creative stuff digitalized on to it doesn’t feel or look like a ten-million-peseta investment.’

‘Were there any unhappy established artists that he was representing?’

‘He worked very closely with his artists. He didn’t make those sorts of mistakes.’

‘What about in the last six months? Do you recall anything suspicious, an unpleasant or humiliating …’

‘He’s not been so concentrated on his work. He’s been
concerned about his sister and he’s been abroad a lot. Mainly the Far East — Thailand, the Philippines.’

The thought of Salgado pursuing his needs with oriental boys congealed in Falcón’s mind. He felt grimy in front of the blonde Greta — he with his new knowledge, she with her untarnished memories. He realized that he was diminished by the truth, and she, unsullied in her ignorance.

‘Did Ramón ever talk about his wife?’ he asked.

‘I didn’t know he’d been married,’ she said. ‘He was a very private man. I never thought of him as particularly Spanish even. There was a lot of Swiss reserve about him.’

We are such different things to different people, thought Falcón. Salgado was quiet, powerful, kind and private with a woman he had no need to impress, and yet to Falcón he was always oily, tedious, ingratiating and pompous. With a good memory we could be who we wanted to be, with whoever we liked — all of us actors and every day a new play.

He went upstairs to Salgado’s office, now occupied by Ramírez and Fernández in their shirtsleeves on either side of the desk, leafing through papers.

‘We’re not getting very far here,’ said Ramírez. ‘The best we’ve got is what Greta gave us in the first half-hour, which was their client list, the list of artists he used to represent, those he still represents and those he’s rejected. The rest is letters, bills, the usual stuff. No correspondence between him and Sra Jiménez. No little note from Sergio saying, “You’re fucked.”’

It was late. Falcón told them to pack it in. He went back to the Jefatura. The trunk from Salgado’s attic was already there. He took the film and spooled it into Raúl Jiménez’s projection equipment, which was still set up. The movie must have been a gift, perhaps even from Raúl Jiménez. It consisted of seven sequences of Ramón and
Carmen. They were happy in every shot. Salgado clearly adored her. The look he gave her as she turned to the camera and his eyes remained fixed on her cheek, there was no mistaking it.

Falcón sat in the dark with the flickering images. He had no way of controlling himself. He had no one to control himself for. He wept without knowing why and despised himself for it, as he used to despise cinema audiences who wailed at the crass sentimentality on the silver screen.

Extracts from the Journals of Francisco Falcón

2nd November 1946, Tangier

An American came to see me yesterday. A sizeable piece of humanity. He introduced himself as Charles Brown III and asked to see my work. My English has improved with all the Americans suddenly appearing in the Café Central. I don’t want him leafing through my drawings and tell him I have to show properly and to come back in the afternoon. This gives me time to find out from R. that he is the representative of Barbara Hutton, the new Queen of the Kasbah. I set up the work I want to show and when he returns and we enter the room I say: ‘Everything’s for sale, except that one,’ which is the drawing of P.

There’s a rumour that inside the Palace of Sidi Hosni there is a world of wealth beyond even R.’s imagination. Each of the thirty rooms has its own gold mantel clock from Van Cleef & Arpels at a cost of $10,000 a piece. Anybody who spends a third of a million dollars to tell the time can only value things by price alone. ‘She will not buy a drawing from you for $20,’ says R. ‘She doesn’t know how much that is. It’s as little as a centavo is to us.’ I tell him I have never sold a piece in my life. ‘Then you should sell your first piece for no less than $500.’ He gives me the sales technique, which I have put into practice. I follow Charles Brown around the room and talk him through the work, but all I can sense is his desperation to get back to the drawing of P. At the end he asks: ‘Just outa interest, how much is the charcoal drawing of the nude?’ I tell him it’s not for sale. It has no price. He keeps using the phrase, ‘just outa interest’ and I say, ‘I don’t know.’ He goes back to the piece. I play it by R.’s book and don’t go with him but smoke at the other end of the room and look as if I’m amusing myself, rather than what I want to do which is burst like a balloon of water so that all that is left of me is a puddle of gratitude and a bladder.