The Blind Man of Seville (46 page)

25th June 1947, Tangier

I am repelled by my own rapacity. My inability to create has induced a need for endless change. I tour the brothels and hunt out new young men and tire of them instantly. I smoke powerful hashish and spend whole days fluttering like a flag in the enervating
cherqi
that knocks incessantly at the doors. My arms are weak, my penis flaccid. I spend whole nights in the Bar La Mar Chica surrounded by drunks, reprobates, idiots and whores. I have given up on majoun, under its influence I only revisit the old horrors — blood-covered walls, ramps of dead bodies, mud and blood, flesh and white bone churn in my head.

1st July 1947, Tangier

After ending up drunk on R.’s doorstep he has sent me back to work on the boats.

1st January 1948, Tangier

A new year. It has to be better than the last. I still cannot face the blank canvas. These are my first writings since July. I am in better shape physically. I am no longer fat but I am unable to rid myself of this sense of desolation. I have tried to find P. I even went to Granada only to find that her home has been sold and that the family had moved to Madrid, but nobody knew where.

I have nothing to report. The wind-whipped chabolas on the edge of town contain nothing of the misery in my privileged body. I laid out the seven drawings of P. in the hope of feeling a new surge of possibility. I accomplished the reverse.

I have been allowed up, I have been granted the enormous privilege of putting my eye to the crack and have seen the real nature of things and I have brought it down and shown the same to ordinary mortals. But P. was a part of it, she was my muse and I have lost her. I will not paint or draw again. I am destined for the trough where everybody bends their heads — eat, work, sleep.

25th March 1948, Tangier

I have seen her. In the market off the Petit Soco. I have seen her. Across a thousand heads. I have seen her. Was it her?

1st April 1948, Tangier

Am I so desperate that I will pin my hopes on phantoms? I go to every doctor in town to see if she is in their employ. Nothing. R. wants to send me out on the boats again rather than have me crash to earth like a sunstroked bird.

3rd April 1948, Tangier

I leave the house and there she is in the street, pacing this way and that. At the sight of her I have to hold on to the door, my legs have gone. I ask her in. She says nothing and crosses the threshold in front of me. Her smell fills my chest and I know that I have been saved. The houseboy makes us tea. She won’t sit even when it arrives. She strokes the houseboy’s head. He slips out as if touched by an angel.

I don’t know where to start. It is as if I’m in front of the canvas and my hand goes to this corner, that quarter, the middle and makes no mark. I have done this for hours and when finally I decide where I am going to touch the white, white canvas, I make no mark. There is no paint on the brush. This is how I am now. I force myself to speak.

Me: I came looking for you in Granada … when I didn’t hear from you.

Silence.

Me: They told me that your aunt had died, that your mother was sick and that you had all gone to Madrid.

P.: That was true.

Me: They had no address for you. No way of contacting you.

P.: That was not true.

Silence.

Me: Why was that
not
true?

P.: They knew exactly where we were. My father had told them and he had also told them not to tell anyone answering to your description, coming from Tangier, asking questions about his daughter.

Me: I don’t understand.

P.: He didn’t want me to see you ever again.

Me: Was it something to do with me … I mean, … those drawings? Did he hear about them? That you had stood before me …?

P.: No. That was private between you and me.

Me: So what happened? I can’t think how I could have crossed him. We only ever talked about my back.

P.: My father speaks Arabic.

Me: Of course he does, he was in Melilla. Where is your father … I must talk to him.

P.: My father is dead.

Me. I am sorry.

P.: He died six months after my mother.

Me: You have been suffering.

P.: I have had eighteen months of sorrow. It has aged and hardened me.

Me: You still look as you did. You don’t wear it in your face.

P.: I was telling you that my father spoke Arabic and because he spoke some of the Riffian dialects he was asked if he would spend a morning a week treating poor people in the chabolas on the outskirts of town. The American woman, ‘La Rica’, Sra Hutton had given money for medicines and food. He volunteered. He came across the usual things in malnourished people, but he also came across a surprising number of mutilations. Ears missing, fingers and thumbs cut off, nostrils split. Nobody would tell him how these injuries were incurred until he treated a woman who had been there the week before with her son, who had lost an ear. She was covered in shame at having to be handled by a man but was in such pain she had to succumb. He asked her about her son and why nobody would tell him what had happened. ‘They won’t talk because it is your people who are doing this,’ she said. My father was stunned. She told him how these boys have to steal because they are starving and about the injuries they have to sustain to feed their families and the deaths that have resulted. My father was appalled and asked who was doing this. ‘The men who are guarding the warehouses.’

I am silent. The inside of my body is frozen. My chest is an ice cave through which the coldest wind is blowing. My muse has returned to tell me why she can never speak to me again.

P.: A boy with an infected wound was brought back to the surgery. This was unusual but he’d touched my father by his courage and his acceptance of pain without complaint. The boy recovered and my father employed him around the house. One lunchtime he disappeared. We searched the house. He was cowering in the back of the laundry. He couldn’t speak except to ask, ‘Has he gone? Has he gone?’ His terror was pure. We asked him who he was afraid of and he would only say: ‘El Marroquí.’ It happened again the next day. My father looked in his consultation book and his only patients that day were Sr Cardoso, who was eighty-two, and … you.

The next day he took the boy to the Petit Soco. You took your usual seat at the Café Central. And the boy told my father that you were the one — El Marroquí.

I cannot move. The green eyes are on me. I know that this is the crux. I know it because life is tearing past as if both our lives are being compressed into this one moment. I decide I will ignore it. I will lie. Just as I have lied to all of them — C.B., the Queen of the Kasbah, the Contesse de Blah and the Duque de Flah. I will lie. I am Francisco Falcón. No.
He
is Francisco Falcón. I no longer exist.

P.: Were you responsible for what happened to those people?

The green eyes are willing me, beseeching me and I know that I am lost. I look into my hands, which contain life’s water, and see it bubble and wink, mocking me, as it leaks through my fingers.

Me: Yes, I did those things. I am responsible.

She doesn’t leave. She looks into me and I realize I have done the right thing.

P.: My parents made discreet enquiries about the company you worked for. My father found out that you were a legionnaire and a contrabandista and that it was
your
capacity for violence which inspired fear in all your enemies and competitors. They decided to send me away. It was a coincidence that my aunt became sick.

Me: But why force you to leave? Why not just forbid you to see me?

P.: Because they knew I was in love with you.

She finally sits down and asks for a cigarette. She can hardly hold it. I light it for her and put it in her fingers. She stares into the floor. I tell her everything. I tell her about ‘the incident’ (or nearly everything about it) that drove me out of my family home to join the Legion. I tell her what I did in the Civil War, in Russia, at Krasni Bor. I tell her why I left Seville, what happened in Tangier … everything. I tell her about my desolation. I tell her how she fits Inside me, how she is my structure. She listens. The sky grows dark. The wind gets up. The boy brings more mint tea and a candle that wavers in the draught. There is only one thing I don’t talk about. I tell her every hideous thing, but I don’t tell her about the boys. That is not something for a woman’s ears. The admissions have been of such staggering enormity that to introduce depravity would put me beyond redemption. I finish by talking about the work. How I have stopped the work. How I have been unable to progress beyond the drawings. How I need her to open my eyes again. I ask her if she remembers her last words to me on the day we made the drawings. She shakes her head. I tell her: ‘Now you know.’

As I write this she lies on the bed, a vague form beneath the mosquito netting. A candle with a tall spear of flame burns by her bed. She sleeps. I reach for the charcoal and paper.

3rd June 1948, Tangier

P. tells me she is pregnant. I drop tools for the day and we lie in bed together with our throats so full we cannot speak about the wholeness of our future together and the children we will have.

18th June 1948, Tangier

After a civil ceremony at the Spanish Legation and a short Mass in the cathedral P. and I are married. R. arranges for a reception at the Hotel El Minzah. As they have begun to say now, in true Riviera style:
le tout
Tangier was there. We are surrounded by strangers at our own wedding and leave as soon as it is polite. We disappear under the mosquito netting with a hashish cigarette. We float on each other’s caresses and make love as man and wife for the first time.

She is tired and wants to sleep. I rest my head on her belly and hear the cells doubling within. I have too much energy and get up to work. I think it is an auspicious day so I take up paint and make my first mark on the canvas. It is a start. I become nervous and decide to take a walk through the Medina up towards the Kasbah to stand on the fortifications and look out over the night sea to contemplate my future. I am stopped in the Petit Soco by people who want to congratulate me and buy me a drink. They are insistent. C. is among them. I haven’t seen him for months. I let him buy me a whisky. We talk and joke for a while and I take my leave. C. catches up with me on my way to the Kasbah. He takes my arm and asks why I have been ignoring him, why have I been sending his boys away? He tells me I have frozen up again, that marriage is for lawyers and doctors, that bourgeois living is the enemy of the artist. I remind him who P. is. We have been walking at a leisurely pace and he is now steering me towards a house. He tells me it is a bar and he would like to buy me one last drink. We take a seat in a courtyard and a drink is served. There is a walkway around this courtyard, like a cloister. Without my noticing, candles are lit in this walkway and suddenly young men are loitering there. C. is prattling about the subversion of sensuality, the anarchy of depravity. I don’t listen but look at the muscular delineation of the boys’ thighs as they walk beneath the uncertain light. I am stirred up. C. hands me a cigarette. There is hashish in it which slips into my blood like cream. My lips caress the cigarette. The night folds around me. More boys float past. C. leaves with one of them. They take me by the arms and lead me away. They undress me. They knead me. They massage my resistance away. I collapse to their touch.

I come round with my lips to a boy’s back. I dress quickly. I find the courtyard. There is no sign of C. I walk back home. I strip in the bathroom and scrub at my genitals until they are raw. I stand naked at the end of the marital bed and look down on my sleeping wife. What sort of a man am I?

She stirs under my gaze and her head comes up off the pillow. ‘My husband,’ she says and smiles. She rubs the bed next to her. I lie down. What sort of a man am I?

25

Saturday, 21st April 2001, Falcón’s House, Calle Bailén, Seville

What was the ingredient in sleeping pills that suppressed dreams? Was it the same one that dried the mouth and lined the brain with towelling? Falcón lay in the dark, pressing his fingers to his stiff face like a boxer inspecting last night’s damage. And what about these black holes in the memory? The thought brought back Alicia’s words to him last night.

‘A neurosis is like a black hole in space. It is bizarre and inexplicable. How can something as catastrophic as the collapse of a star happen? How can something that has happened to a human being be so painful that we refuse to remember it, that we collapse that part of the brain?’ she said. ‘There’s more to this analogy, because the collapsed star has such a powerful gravitational pull that it constantly sucks more matter into its negative world. So the neurosis draws all the positive things in your life towards it, consumes them and makes them anti-positive. You’ve described to me some important relationships in your life, with your first serious girlfriend, Isabel Alamo, and your ex-wife, Inés. They were both strong relationships, with passion on both sides, but they could not withstand the gravitational pull of the black hole within you.’

‘With Inés it was just sex. I know that now,’ he’d said.

‘Do you?’ said Alicia. ‘You don’t think that possibly it was you who wanted to maintain it at that level? Sex is manageable. Love is complex.’